Long ago, deep in the heart of my grade school, people thronged through the colorful rooms filled with parish festival games and wonderment to my six-year-old eyes.
The choices seemed limitless: bean bag toss, ring toss, crafts of all kinds, and . . . the cakewalk.
What was this? In exchange for my little ticket, I could walk around the circle of numbers to music and possibly win a cake? A whole cake?
My excitement was palpable.
Handing over my ticket, I looked at the prize cake — a giant multilayered round heaped with fluffy white frosting in tiny peaks. My mouth watered. The music began and I walked with great anticipation around the circle of numbers on the floor.
The music stopped. The winning number was eight. And I was standing on it!
I had won the amazing cake! And it had been so easy! I couldn’t believe my luck as I carried the prize cake home and imagined the tastiness in store.
After supper, I watched my mom cut everyone big slices of the delectable prize, revealing brown cake beneath the white frosting. I raised the fork to my mouth and closed my eyes, expecting to taste a little bit of chocolate heaven.
But then . . . bitterness flooded my mouth.
It wasn’t chocolate. It was mocha.
To my six-year-old tastebuds, coffee was the worst possible flavor in the world. I couldn’t eat my beautiful prize.
I cried.
For the first time in my young life, I tasted the bitterness of disappointment.
Just a part of life
Because we are not in Heaven yet, disappointment is a very real part of life: Disappointment in ourselves, disappointment in others, disappointment in loved ones, events, situations, leaders, groups, institutions, society, countries, the world — you name it.
If a thing can turn out very good, it can also turn out very bad. This is simply part of our fallen human nature and the fact that we have free will and can make our own choices, a quality God has given us out of love.
But if you look more closely at why we are disappointed in a given situation, sometimes part of the disappointment is a result of expectations we have built up in our minds. Maybe our standards are impossible, maybe we expect too much, maybe we unwittingly put our trust in human hands instead of God’s.
If we make a conscious effort to strip away false expectations and prayerfully place our trust only in what God wants, then disappointment becomes easier to swallow. Just like with the maturity of growing tastebuds an adult can tolerate the bitterness of coffee, so too with the maturity of trusting fully in God can we begin to recognize the lessons behind earthly disappointments.
Good from bad
As you grow and look at your life with eyes of faith, you begin to see that good can come out of bad situations. Even if we can’t see the good from a particular situation during our lifetime, with trust in God’s wisdom we know He is at work in all things.
“Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:1-5).
When we look around ourselves at the world, trusting in God’s plan instead of our own and anchoring ourselves in His unending fatherly love, we know He can help us garner wisdom and strength from our disappointments and indeed grow more tastebuds for tolerating the bitterness of life.
As a six-year-old girl, I couldn’t stomach the bitterness of my fallen expectations, my first lesson in disappointment.
But now, sharing the good part of my childhood memory with my own children so many years later, during family celebrations we indeed play the cakewalk game.
In our household, however, the prize cake is chocolate.
Never mocha.
Julianne Nornberg, mother of four children, is a member of St. John the Baptist Parish, Waunakee.