This is #18 in a series of essays on aging.

My friend Philip Yancey once wrote a book entitled Disappointment with God. His uncle was scandalized and angry. “God never disappoints us,” he wrote Philip.

He was right, of course, but he missed Philip’s point. The problem is not with God, but with us. There is a mismatch between what we expect from God and what he provides. He may offer the very best, but it’s not necessarily what we have in mind. So we’re disappointed.

That comes to a head when we grow older. Because, let’s be honest, none of us wants to get old. Losing agility, strength, and energy was not in our plan. Neither were death and disease. They come, inexorably, as the years pass.

Christians have been told all their lives that God loves them and has beautiful plans for them. They know God’s promise to never leave them. Furthermore, God is a fountain of life; “surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”

If that’s your expectation, you can certainly feel disappointed. To aging people who read their Bible, its promises frequently seem far off from their situation. They pray but it seems to make no difference in their quality of life. Such disappointment afflicts people of all ages, but it’s most potent for those of us getting older. Time grows short. Life seems unlikely to change for the better. This is what we get out of life, and it’s not getting any better. Rather, it’s going downhill. We’re loaded down with disappointments.

 Disappointment with God is a natural consequence. Lots of people don’t want to admit that—it feels wrong to say it—but they essentially give up on God as an active mover in their life. They may still find emotional comfort in singing hymns, in going to church, even in saying prayers, but they no longer expect God to make life better. They no longer expect God to show up.

At that point, they need to step back and re-evaluate what they expected of God. It would help if they would read the Bible with these disappointments in mind, asking themselves, what did God promise?

They’ll discover that God promises suffering. He promises all the blessings of the Beatitudes: poverty, sadness, timidity, dissatisfaction. Peter tells his church members not to be surprised at suffering; after all, they follow a Lord who suffered.

The Bible promises an upside-down world, in which the first come in last and the last first. This leaves little room for disappointment. If you end up on the bottom, you got what you were promised. But what a view from there, if we can open our eyes and see!

That is the promise of aging from a genuinely Christian perspective. As we suffer one loss after another, disappointment on top of disappointment, we can come closer to the perspective Jesus brought his disciples when he told them that he had to go to Jerusalem to suffer and to die. We are on that same trip. It leads to glory, but there are no shortcuts.