I’ve been thinking a lot about disappointment lately. Not in the tidy, tie-it-up-with-a-bow way we usually talk about it in Christian circles, but in the messy, middle-of-the-night, “God where are you?” kind of way.
Because here’s the truth nobody wants to say out loud: disappointment doesn’t just hurt. It changes us. And if we’re not careful, it builds a prison we don’t even realize we’re living in.
The marriage you thought God promised. The children who walked away from everything you raised them to believe. The ministry that imploded. The healing that never came. The friendships that died slow, painful deaths. The version of yourself you were supposed to become by now.
We carry these stones everywhere. We’ve gotten so used to the weight that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to walk without them.
What Scripture Actually Reveals About Disappointment
Here’s what wrecked me when I finally saw it in Scripture: God never minimizes our disappointments. He enters into them.
Look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This isn’t a quiet, contemplative prayer moment. Luke tells us He was in such anguish that “his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Medical scholars call this hematidrosis—a condition caused by extreme stress where capillaries burst and blood mixes with sweat.
Jesus was facing the crushing weight of becoming sin for us, and His closest friends—the ones who promised to die with Him—couldn’t even stay awake to pray with Him for one hour.
That’s disappointment at the deepest level.
And what did Jesus do? He brought the full weight of it to the Father: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me” (Luke 22:42).
No spiritualizing. No pretending it didn’t hurt. No theological bypass.
Just raw, honest bringing of His deepest pain to the Father.
But then notice what happens next: “Yet not my will, but yours be done.”
This is the pathway through disappointment that changes everything: honest expression followed by surrendered trust.
Not because the disappointment disappeared. Not because Jesus suddenly understood the Father’s plan. But because He knew the Father’s heart.
The Invitation Hidden in 1 Peter 5:7
“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.”
I used to read that verse as nice encouragement. But when I studied the Greek, everything shifted.
The word “cast” is epirrhiptō—it means to hurl or throw with force. This isn’t gently placing our burdens before God. It’s actively, deliberately throwing the weight of our disappointments onto Him.
And notice Peter says “all your anxiety”—not just the spiritual ones, not just the acceptable ones, but ALL of them. The ones you’re ashamed of. The ones that make you question God’s goodness. The ones you think you should be over by now.
Peter knew about disappointment. He was the one who denied Jesus three times after swearing he’d die with Him. He was the one who sank when he tried to walk on water. He was the one Jesus had to rebuke: “Get behind me, Satan!”
Peter writes this verse from the other side of his own crushing disappointments—after Jesus restored him, after Pentecost, after experiencing firsthand that God can handle our heaviest burdens.
And here’s the key phrase: “because he cares for you.”
The Greek word is melei—it means God is genuinely concerned, personally invested, actively caring about what concerns you. Your disappointments aren’t too small for His attention or too big for His capacity.
He can handle the weight you’ve been carrying. He wants to handle it.
What We Build When We Won’t Release
Here’s what I didn’t see for years: when we hold onto disappointment, we’re not just hurting ourselves. We’re building walls that separate us from the very intimacy we’re desperate for.
With God. Every unprocessed disappointment becomes a brick in the wall between us and the Father. We start reading Scripture like lawyers looking for loopholes instead of daughters listening for our Father’s voice. We pray with our guard up. We worship with reservations.
With others. We love with one foot out the door. We invest in relationships while secretly bracing for betrayal. We become experts at keeping people at arm’s length, at managing our expectations down to nothing, at protecting our hearts so well that nobody can get in.
With ourselves. We stop dreaming because hope feels dangerous. We kill our desires before they can disappoint us. We settle for a small, manageable life because at least it won’t hurt as much.
I know because I lived there. For years, I carried stones of disappointment—about my child’s rebellion, about my body that won’t do what I need it to, about the version of my life that never materialized, about friendships that ended badly.
I thought I was being realistic. Protecting myself. Learning from experience.
But what I was actually doing was building a prison.
The Woman Who Knew This Prison
The woman at the well in John 4 understood this intimately. Five failed marriages. A current relationship that brought nothing but shame. She came to draw water at noon—the hottest part of the day when nobody else would be there—because she couldn’t bear to face the other women and their whispers.
Disappointment had taught her to hide.
But then Jesus showed up. And instead of condemning her or bypassing her pain, He offered her something she’d stopped believing was possible: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13-14).
Jesus didn’t erase her past. Those five marriages still happened. The shame was real. The disappointment was valid.
But He offered her a well that would never run dry.
And watch what happened: she left her water jar—the very thing she came for—and ran to tell the whole town about Jesus. Her past disappointments didn’t disappear, but they stopped being her prison and became part of her testimony.
The people she’d been hiding from became the very ones she invited to meet Jesus.
This is what release does. It doesn’t erase the past. It transforms what the past means.
What It Actually Costs to Hold On
Let me get specific about what holding onto disappointment costs us, because we need to count this cost honestly:
It distorts how we see God’s character. Every unanswered prayer becomes evidence that maybe He doesn’t really care. Every delayed promise feels like proof that His love has conditions we’re not meeting. We start believing lies about His heart.
It makes us unavailable for intimacy. We can’t give our whole hearts to relationships when half our heart is nursing past wounds. We can’t be fully present when we’re constantly braced for the next disappointment.
It steals our present joy. We become so focused on what didn’t happen that we miss what God is doing right now. We’re so busy protecting ourselves from future disappointment that we can’t receive current blessings.
It poisons our witness. We become cynical instead of hopeful, guarded instead of generous, bitter instead of grateful. And people can feel it.
The enemy loves to use disappointment this way. He can’t change the past, but he can use it to steal our future if we let him.
What Jesus Offers Instead: The Exchange
Here’s the gospel hidden in Isaiah 61:3—God promises to “bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
Notice the word “instead.” This is an exchange, not just an addition.
We bring Him our ashes—the burnt remains of our dreams, our disappointments, our shattered expectations. And He gives us beauty in return.
We bring Him our mourning—the grief over what we lost, what never happened, what was taken from us. And He gives us joy.
We bring Him our despair—the heavy spirit that says nothing will ever change. And He gives us praise.
But here’s the key: We have to actually bring Him the ashes. We have to release the mourning. We have to surrender the despair.
God doesn’t bypass our pain. He transforms it. But transformation requires participation.
This is what Jesus meant when He said, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).
He’s not offering to add His yoke to our burdens. He’s offering to exchange them.
His yoke for our heavy burdens. His rest for our striving. His light load for the crushing weight we’ve been carrying.
The Freedom Jesus Promises
When we finally release our disappointments to Jesus, we discover freedoms we’d forgotten were possible:
Freedom to trust God’s heart even when we can’t see His hand. Not blind trust that ignores reality, but surrendered trust that says, “I don’t understand this, but I know who You are.”
Freedom to love without a safety net. To invest deeply in relationships even though people will disappoint us. To give our whole hearts even though they might get broken again. Because the alternative—a guarded, self-protected life—isn’t actually safer. It’s just lonelier.
Freedom to hope again. This might be the scariest one. Because hoping means making ourselves vulnerable to disappointment again. But consider Abraham and Sarah—decades of crushing disappointment over their childlessness. Yet when God renewed His promise, they found the courage to believe. Romans 4:18 says Abraham “hoped against hope.” He chose to hope even when circumstances screamed hopelessness.
Freedom to see our disappointments redeemed. Paul understood this when he wrote, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
Your disappointments aren’t wasted. When you release them to Jesus, they become the very foundation for ministering to others walking through similar pain. Your wounds become credentials that allow you to sit with someone else’s wounds without flinching.
A Physical Act of Spiritual Release
Throughout Scripture, God used physical actions to represent spiritual realities. When Joshua led Israel across the Jordan, God told them to take twelve stones from the riverbed to build a memorial of His faithfulness (Joshua 4:1-9). When the religious leaders wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus invited anyone without sin to cast the first stone—and one by one, they dropped their stones and walked away (John 8:1-11).
Today, I want to invite you into your own stone ceremony.
Not to cast stones in judgment, but to physically release the weight you’ve been carrying.
Here’s what you need:
- Several small stones
- A permanent marker
- A container of water
- Your journal
- Time alone with Jesus
First, prepare your heart:
Sit quietly and ask the Holy Spirit to bring to mind the disappointments you’ve been carrying. Don’t rush this. Let Him surface what He wants to surface.
Then, write each disappointment on a stone. One disappointment per stone. Feel the weight of it. Acknowledge what it’s cost you to carry it.
As you hold each stone, speak these truths over it:
- “God sees this pain and cares about it” (1 Peter 5:7)
- “God can work even this for my good” (Romans 8:28)
- “This disappointment does not define my future” (Jeremiah 29:11)
- “God’s love for me hasn’t changed” (Romans 8:38-39)
- “I choose to trust God’s timing and plan” (Ecclesiastes 3:1)
Now comes the release. One by one, drop each stone into the water. As you do, pray:
“Father, I release this disappointment to You. I have carried it long enough. I choose to trust that You are good, that You love me, and that You have a plan for my life that includes redemption for this pain. I place this disappointment in Your capable hands and ask You to heal the wounded places in my heart. Replace my disappointment with Your peace, my bitterness with Your joy, my hopelessness with Your hope. In Jesus’ name.”
Watch as each stone sinks to the bottom. This represents your disappointment being buried in the depths of God’s mercy and grace.
Finally, receive what He offers. Sit quietly and ask God what He wants to give you in place of each disappointment. He might bring to mind a scripture, a sense of peace, a new perspective, hope for the future, compassion for others, or a dream for what’s ahead.
Write these gifts in your journal.
I did this with my own disappointments a couple of years ago and again a few months ago. I wrote about the choices that those I love have made that break my heart. My body that struggles. The ministry vision that didn’t materialize the way I expected. Friendships that ended. Death that stole the healing. Dreams that never came to reality.
And when I dropped those stones into the water, something broke open in my chest. Not because the disappointments disappeared, but because I finally admitted I couldn’t carry them anymore—and Jesus was willing to carry them for me.
Living From Release
Releasing disappointment isn’t a one-time prayer and done. It’s a daily—sometimes hourly—choice to stop picking up stones we’ve already given Him.
When thoughts or emotions about past disappointments return (and they will), this is what I’m learning to do:
Acknowledge them without shame. “Yes, this still hurts sometimes. That’s okay.”
Remind myself of what’s true. “I’ve already released this to Jesus. It’s in His hands, not mine.”
Pray it again. “God, I’ve already given this to You. I trust You with it again today.”
Focus on what He’s doing now instead of what didn’t happen then.
This is what living with open hands looks like—holding our dreams, relationships, and expectations loosely enough that God can do something better than what we planned.
And I’m learning that the stones I’ve been carrying—the disappointments that felt like they would crush me—are actually building something. Not a prison this time, but a memorial. A testimony to God’s faithfulness in the hardest places.
The Invitation to Encounter
So here’s my challenge to you: Don’t just read this and feel inspired. Don’t just think about your disappointments. Don’t just agree that release sounds nice.
Actually come to Jesus with your stones.
He’s not afraid of your disappointment. He’s not shocked by your bitterness. He’s not put off by your questions or your doubts or your anger.
He’s inviting you to bring it all—every crushing weight, every shattered dream, every unmet expectation—and exchange it for His rest.
This is the table He’s set. This is the encounter He offers.
You can walk away changed. But you have to actually come. You have to actually release. You have to actually trust that He can handle what you’ve been carrying.
Your disappointments aren’t wasted. But they will poison you if you keep drinking them.
Jesus is waiting. The invitation stands. The exchange is ready.
Will you come?
What disappointments have you been carrying? What would it cost you to finally release them? What might it cost you NOT to? The stone ceremony isn’t just a nice exercise—it’s an opportunity to actually encounter Jesus with your pain and walk away free. Will you take Him up on His offer?