I'm coming to you now from the basin. This is a special bonus teaching that I recorded just for you to break it down a little more.

Take it a little deeper. I hope you enjoy this overflow message. Let me know. Let's go.

You know, disappointment can be a disease. It can eat away our ability to dream, our ability to hope and hope deferred makes the heart sick.

One proverb says the King James version. And when you think about the disease of disappointment is misleading, meaning that, you know,

there's never a way that a disease in my body is a good thing. We don't ever think of that in a positive sense. Disappointment, while it's not a positive thing to feel or experience, it is in its own way.

The necessary flip side of having hope. If you don't hope, you can't be disappointed. If you never are willing to risk disappointment, you can't hope.

And man, am I preaching to myself today? Because, look, I've spent large chunks of my adult life thinking that I could figure out a strategy to avoid disappointment and still get the things I hope to have.

Whether that's with people, man, they let me down. I'm not going to reach out to them because they last three times they let me down. I'm not going to invest in that relationship because, look, what did that get me with this person over here or what did that get me last time that I encouraged them? I'm not saying anything this time. I'm not going out of my way.

It's embarrassing to admit that, but even in some of the goals that I've reached that were disappointing or the things that I tried to achieve and I didn't get the success that I wanted and I was disappointed. I developed a strategy.

It was a secret strategy. I never came out and said, hey, I'm going to set out to avoid disappointment. But I definitely did that in some major ways in my life. Still, I'm tempted to do it sometimes. Not going to go for it, not going to initiate it because what if it doesn't work out? All of these things are familiar to us.

But disappointment, hope, deferred, a dream that doesn't come to pass, things that don't work out the way you wanted. Disillusionment, wishing life would be one way and experiencing it another way.

If you don't learn how to recognize that stuff and check it and treat it and deal with it and process it in a good way that honors God and involves him and brings in his spirit to help you interpret it.

It will spread that unchecked disappointment will spread. It will spread into your language. It will spread into your way of thinking. It will spread into sometimes even subconsciously the way that you approach your day,

the way you carry yourself, the way you treat your body, what's the point in taking care of yourself? Doesn't ever work out for you anyway. You tried that before. So disappointment is definitely a disease if left unchecked. But if treated, I actually think it can be one of the things that God can use to develop our trust in him.

Through being disappointed, that's how God moves us on sometimes or through being disappointed in something that's how we see that it was empty to begin with.

As I teach this today about disappointment, and I think about, if we're going to experience disappointment, if we hope, there's no potential for hope without the risk of disappointment. That's my basic premise here.

There is no put that down somewhere, put that down somewhere. There is no potential for hope without the risk of disappointment.

I might even need to say it more strongly than that. There is no potential for glory without potential disappointment. And I don't mean glory for just your own self, your own sake, like, I want glory.

If you don't show up for the race, you can't win it. If you don't show up for the fight, there's no crown. If you don't engage in the struggle, there is no victory.

To risk disappointment, to risk that it's going to feel like it was all for nothing, to risk that you're going to lose the money, or to risk that you're going to waste your time, or to risk that it's going to be awkward. That's the part of it.

What I have found in my life that made me want to make this video about the antidote, antidote, maybe good if I knew how to say the words that I'm teaching about.

But again, that's what this space is for. The antidote to disappointment is not to avoid situations that are potentially disappointing.

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