Chad: Persisting through Disappointment

It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.

-Proverbs 25:2

...incline your ear to wisdom,
And apply your heart to understanding;
Yes, if you cry out for discernment,
And lift up your voice for understanding,
If you seek her as silver,
And search for her as for hidden treasures;
Then you will understand the fear of the Lord,
And find the knowledge of God.
For the Lord gives wisdom;
From His mouth come knowledge and understanding;

-Proverbs 2:2-6

This is the testimony of an answered prayer, but not as I would have expected.

The Call to Act

In April 2025 a friend of mine sent me a job posting, it was my dream job at my dream company. It was also a massive long-shot and would require re-locating. For a couple of days my wife and I prayed and discerned over whether I should apply. We both felt not just a peace, but a conviction and expectation around it: a “I should apply” not just a “I could apply”. I filled out their rather long form with a sense of urgency, and shortly after they stopped accepting any more applications.

We waited to hear back for several months, and in the interim we prayed for clarity and confirmation over our discernment. It’d be a big change to what we expected out of that season, but the important thing is to give our “yes” when God asks, not to understand what it’s being asked for. As we continued to pray we continued to feel that we had been discerning correctly. So we gave the outcome to him, praying for His will to be done, not ours. But honestly, feeling the conviction we felt I didn’t know how the outcome could be anything but success.

In July I got a sense of urgency to send them a project I had been working on that was related to their work. I sent it off after burning a lot of midnight oil to get it ready, and a week later heard that I was accepted into their final round of interviews. Of ~400 applicants I’d made it to their final dozen!

The Disappointment

I interviewed in August, and learned in October that they had moved forward with another applicant. I knew it was a massive long shot, but then why the conviction to apply? Why the sense that these were the correct steps to be taking in this season?

And the funny thing about how far I made it is that I couldn’t write it off as a fluke. If I’d gotten dropped in an early round it’d be easy to say that I was lost in the shuffle of so many candidates. If I’d been dropped in one of their middle rounds it’d be easy to say that it was an impossible long-shot anyway. But making it in sight of the finish line and falling short? That felt to me like it was making a point: it was not something that I could disregard. But if I wasn’t going to get it, then why did we get the conviction for me to apply?

Was there some greater purpose here? Or perhaps we’d been wrong all along, perhaps our “conviction” and “discernment” was simply us being deceived by our own excitement? Sure there were some weird God-timings, but surely He wouldn’t lead us to walk into failure?

How poor must our discernment be if we both felt God leading us in this direction then? If our discernment is so poor, that certainly calls into question many of the things we’re acting on in this season!

Or is my ability to screw things up greater than His ability to lead and redeem? Did I confidently and prayerfully walk straight out of His hands through my own incompetence?

But as much as I felt this to be true, I knew that it was incorrect. I have a testimony of how I failed the application for where I currently work, but instead of failing I got placed into a different department through a wild God-coincidence. So as much as I can feel like my capacity to fail is greater than His capacity to fix I know that it isn’t the case. But what then? Was there something happening behind the scenes?

Our prayer-walks and prayer-journaling included these questions over the next season, and crazily enough we continued to feel like we had discerned correctly. But can you trust your discernment telling you that you’d discerned correctly when your discernment’s validity is the question at hand?

And if our discernment was correct, then what was the point of that 6-month application process anyway?

We eventually decided to trust our discernment, and instead started praying for clarity toward that season. Surely He hadn’t led us through that process in vain, So what were we supposed to be learning in this season? What was the point of the disappointment?

The Answered Prayer

We didn’t get an answer until mid-January, after 3 months of praying into the question, 9 months after the application was submitted.

One day while praying I realized that this process had kicked off a parallel series of realizations and decisions over those same nine months. That process led me to discover a tool that brought healing and breakthrough into both of our lives. It brought clarity to how our past traumas influenced our current behaviors and drove our defense mechanisms, and it gave us steps we could take to be free of them. It has been a great tool of healing for the both of us, and we wouldn’t have received it without going through this “disappointment”.

Returning to the scriptures at the top: I believe it was our continued prayer and seeking into the whys of our disappointment that led me to this realization. Connecting the dots and seeing God’s faithfulness in the midst of disappointment happened over a week after discovering that tool.

I cannot confidently say whether receiving that fruit was predicated on the continuation of our prayers, but I can confidently say that our understanding that God had led me through a defeat in order to lead me into a greater victory came from this prayer. If we hadn’t persisted in prayer through disappointment, would this still be sitting in our hearts as a failure? As an open sore that undermines hope, faith, and trust? Would we be eating the fruit of His faithfulness while holding bitterness in our hearts simply because we didn’t seek understanding?

By seeking understanding I learned that my defeat was actually Him walking us through a valley to reach victory over decades-long battles that had seemed interminable and stagnated. He answered our prayers for wisdom and understanding, and revealed that He’d also answered our prayers for healing and breakthrough at the same time.

Going from glory to glory doesn’t always look like we expect, and these expectations we put onto God can be dangerous. The conviction we’d originally received was simply to apply. There was no sense over the outcome, just the need to walk in obedience. The disappointment came from my own expectations of what God was doing in that season, not a failure to deliver on God’s part.

How often are we restricting our ability to walk in the victories that God has for us simply due to our own lack of imagination, or our narrow expectations of what victory means?

So, I encourage you to lift up your questions and disappointments to Him with a humble heart. It can take longer than we like, but like the widow of Luke 18 we will prevail if we persist. Cry out for wisdom and seek understanding. He is good to reveal it to us.

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The “tool” we received was being made aware of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) in a weird and round-about way. This could be a whole blog post in itself, but I’ll keep it short.

CBT is more than talk-therapy, it's a framework for understanding our emotions and responses. It theorizes that your experiences do not dictate your emotions, but rather your thoughts about your experiences do. For example, if you do something poorly how differently would you feel if you had the thought after, "I'm a good-for-nothing failure" or if you had the thought, "That did not go as I would have hoped, but I have notes on how I could improve for next time"?

CBT is a toolkit to help you understand the logical fallacies of our internal monologues. It helps us have more productive thoughts, and thereby be less controlled by our emotions. It's a very practical system we can use to "take every thought captive" (2 Cor 10:5).

This may not sound like a particularly spiritual takeaway given the focus of this blog, but life doesn't have such clear boundary lines between what is spiritual and what is physical. Tithing is a spiritual practice, but it's done through physical means. Truly, every aspect of our lives is a reflection of our spiritual nature, and how we engage with and control (or fail to control) our emotions clearly matters:

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty,

And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.

-Proverbs 16:32

Whoever has no rule over his spirit

Is like a city broken down, without walls.

-Proverbs 25:28

And so I ask you to keep your open mind for this, this tool has greatly helped us and we believe it could help you.

As iron sharpens iron,

So one person sharpens another.

-Proverbs 27:17

We have been able to use these tools individually, and have been able to call out cognitive distortions in each other, to encourage each other to take these thought-patterns into our prayer journals where God has done revealing works in our hearts. Through the tool of CBT we have been made much more capable of sharpening one another.

The following is an excerpt found in Feeling Good, by David D. Burns, M.D. in which he summarizes the 10 Cognitive Distortions. If any of these resonate with how you view the world, or match negative thought patterns that you have been trapped in, I'd encourage you to check out his book. It's very cheap on ThriftBooks and you can find a free pdf online [here](https://kupdf.net/download/feeling-good-the-new-mood-therapy-david-burnspdf_5e4572cce2b6f5e30ef1afad_pdf).

1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.

4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

    a. Mind Reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.

    b. The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

6. MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8. SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's a goddam louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.