Christian Almanac: Where Faith Meets Real Life
Episode 23 Transcript
Transcript: When Your Heart Gets Hurt
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Disappointment can become comparison, and unresolved hurt can become resentment. Learn how to grieve honestly, rejoice with others, forgive without excusing harm, maintain necessary boundaries, and find freedom by placing justice in God’s hands.
Few things test our hearts like watching someone else receive the very thing we wanted.
Maybe it was a promotion you thought you were going to get.
Maybe it was an award you were sure you were in line for.
Maybe it was a role in an organization, an invitation, an opportunity, or some kind of recognition that seemed like it was finally going to come your way.
Or maybe it’s much more personal than that.
Maybe you have wanted to be married or wanted children, and those things seem to be happening for everyone around you, but not you.
Maybe you have prayed for healing, financial stability, a new job, an open door, or a restored relationship, and then someone else receives the thing you have been praying for.
That can hurt.
And it can hurt even more when it seemed like a sure thing. You prayed about it. You prepared for it. You worked for it. You imagined what it would be like. You may have even thought, “This must be what God is doing.”
And then it went to someone else.
When that happens, it’s easy to feel disappointed, embarrassed, confused, and even bitter. It’s even possible to become angry with God.
Something inside us may say, “Lord, I thought this was mine. I thought this was my answer.”
I’ve experienced this in my own life. As an author, I know what it feels like to see other books get awards, attention, recognition, and sales that I wish my books were getting. Sometimes I see a book win an award or sell more copies, and my first thought is not always as generous as it should be.
Sometimes I think, “My book is better than that.”
That may not be the most spiritual thought, but it can be the honest one. And that’s where the heart work begins.
The issue is not whether we feel disappointment. We will. The issue is what we do with it.
Do we bring it to God, or do we let it become bitterness?
Disappointment is part of life. Bitterness is different.
Bitterness takes disappointment and gives it a permanent home in our hearts. It replays the situation. It keeps score. It starts building a case.
They didn’t deserve it.
I deserved it more.
The process was unfair.
Nobody sees me.
God must have forgotten me.
Sometimes parts of that story may be true. The process may have been unfair. The better book does not always get the award. The faithful worker does not always get the promotion. The person who did the work behind the scenes does not always get the applause.
We do not have to pretend unfairness never happens.
But even when the situation is unfair, bitterness still damages us.
It narrows our vision. It makes someone else’s blessing feel like a personal attack. It turns another person’s good news into our bad news, and can make us suspicious of God’s goodness.
That’s why these moments matter spiritually. Not because disappointment is sinful, but because disappointment reveals what’s happening in our hearts.
Sometimes the people who love us
unintentionally make it harder. They may say, “You deserved it more,” or “They made the wrong choice.” That may validate the hurt, but comfort can become fuel. We need people who can say, “I know this hurts,” without saying, “Let’s tear that other person down.”
Romans 12:15 says,
“Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” (Romans 12:15, NIV)
That verse is simple, but it’s not easy, because sometimes the rejoicing and the mourning happen at the same time.
Someone else is rejoicing because they got the promotion, the engagement, the pregnancy, the opportunity, the growing platform, or the successful project.
And you are mourning because that’s the very thing you’ve been praying for.
Romans 12:15 does not tell us to pretend we are not hurting. It holds both truths together.
We can mourn honestly, and we can still refuse to resent someone else’s joy.
That’s one of the hard parts of Christian maturity: learning to say, “Lord, I am hurt,” and also, “Lord, bless them.”
Not pretending. Not performing. Not forcing a smile while our hearts are breaking. But bringing the whole thing to God and asking him to help us love rightly, even when we’re disappointed.
When someone else gets what we wanted, we have a choice.
We can become bitter and resentful.
We can tear that person down in our minds.
We can rehearse every reason why they did not deserve it.
Or we can bring our hurt to God and ask him to heal what was exposed.
We can say, “Lord, this hurts more than I expected. I wanted that. I thought it was going to be mine. I don’t understand why it happened this way. But I don’t want bitterness to take root in me.”
That kind of prayer is not weakness. It’s honesty. And it may need to be prayed more than once.
Trusting God is not always a big, one-and-done decision. Often, trust is a decision we make again and again in the same situation.
You choose trust when you first hear the news. Then you choose it again when you see the announcement online. Then you choose it again when the disappointment comes back.
That doesn’t mean you have failed spiritually. It means you’re human.
Some hurts don’t disappear because we prayed about them once. Sometimes God heals us layer by layer. Every time the pain resurfaces, we have another opportunity to bring it back to him instead of turning it into resentment.
Comparison can distort reality.
When someone else gets what we wanted, we may start believing that their blessing somehow used up the supply. As though there was only one good thing God could give. As though their open door means all the doors are now closed for us. As though their success means our work has no value.
But God is not limited that way.
Someone else may get something you wanted, but they cannot get what God has planned for you.
That is yours and only yours.
That doesn’t mean you’ll get the same thing later. Sometimes you will. Sometimes you won’t. God’s plan may look very different from the one you had in mind.
But someone else’s blessing does not cancel God’s care for you.
Their success is not proof that you have been forgotten.
Their answered prayer is not evidence that God ignored yours.
Their opportunity is not the end of your story.
When I see another book receive the attention I wish mine had received, I have to come back to this. I can be honest with God about the disappointment. I can acknowledge the work I put in. I can admit that I wish more people saw the value in what I created.
But I can’t let someone else’s success make me hard, make me smaller, make me suspicious of God, or keep me from doing the work he has given me to do.
That’s the practical place where this matters.
Not in some grand emotional moment, but in the ordinary choices that follow disappointment: the choice not to gossip, not to diminish someone else’s achievement, not to feed the comparison, but instead to bless the other person in prayer, to keep showing up faithfully in our own assignment, and to let God heal what disappointment exposed.
Because when someone else gets what we wanted, it can feel like something was taken from us.
But God is not distracted.
He’s not confused.
He’s not short on blessings.
And he’s not finished with us.
So if you are in that place, if someone else has received the thing you hoped for, bring the hurt to God. Bring him the disappointment, the confusion, the envy, the embarrassment, the questions, all of it.
But do not let bitterness become your response.
Let God meet you in the hurt.
Let him soften what disappointment wants to harden.
Let him remind you that your life is not being measured against someone else’s timeline.
And keep your heart open.
Because someone else may have received something you wanted.
But no one else can receive what God has prepared for you.
When we come back, we’ll take that next step and talk about what it means to forgive when the hurt is real and letting go is hard.
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We must forgive.
Jesus is abundantly clear about that. When someone hurts us, we must forgive them.
We talk a lot about forgiveness in church. Forgiveness is one of the key tenets of the Christian faith. God forgives us, and we are supposed to forgive one another.
But it’s not always easy. We’ve been struggling with it for thousands of years.
More than 300 years ago, in 1711, the English poet Alexander Pope wrote, “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” He was saying that we are not perfect. We make mistakes. But we should try to do for others what God does for us: show mercy and forgive sinners.
Easy for God to say, right? He’s God.
But forgiving sinners does not come naturally to most of us. In What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey wrote, “Because it goes against human nature, forgiveness must be taught and practiced as one would practice any difficult craft.”
So let’s talk about five things that can help us walk the path toward forgiveness.
The first is pray.
When we are hurt and angry, we tend to focus on those emotions. They can block out almost everything else. Prayer does not always remove the pain immediately, but it opens the door for God’s mercy, grace, and love to work in us.
So before you replay the offense again, before you plan what you wish you had said, before you build your case against the person who hurt you, pray.
The second is take an honest and complete look at what really happened.
Step back and look at the big picture. Consider who was involved. Think about motivations. Was the person acting maliciously, or did they make a careless mistake? Was this one incident, or part of a longer pattern?
Sometimes it really is one person who is totally at fault. Maybe a criminal broke into your house and stole your things. Maybe another driver was not paying attention and hit your car.
But when hurt and sin enter a relationship—a marriage, a friendship, a family, a church, or even a business relationship—forgiveness is rarely simple. The need to forgive may be the result of more than one moment. There may be several people involved, with misunderstandings, pride, fear, careless words, and difficult choices all tangled together.
The point is not to make excuses or to take responsibility for someone else’s wrong behavior. The point is to understand the situation honestly. When we do that, we are often several steps closer to forgiveness.
The third is look for what good God can bring from the situation.
We can’t change the past. We can’t undo what happened. Whatever the offense, whatever pain it caused, it’s now part of our story.
But we do have a choice about the future.
That does not mean we call evil good. It does not mean we pretend the hurt did not matter. It means we stay open to the possibility that God can work in us and through us in spite of what happened.
Think back to a time in your own life when someone hurt you, but later you saw something good come out of it.
I can think of times when I lost opportunities because of something someone else said or did, and later God opened a better door. I can think of relationships that ended because of betrayal or conflict, and as painful as that was, it made room in my life for other people who helped me grow. I can also think of lessons that seemed bitter at the time, but after I forgave and healed, God allowed me to use those experiences to help someone else.
Sometimes we need to feel the hurt before we can turn it into something useful. And if we let him, God can take our hurt and use it in ways that honor him and help others.
The fourth thing is let go of getting even.
Forgiveness is not about pretending justice doesn’t matter. Justice matters. Accountability matters. Truth matters.
But revenge is not ours to carry.
In Romans 12:19, Paul writes:
“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” (Romans 12:19, NIV)
When we are focused on getting revenge, or even just wanting to see someone suffer for what they did, we can’t forgive. And when we can’t forgive, we can’t heal.
Letting go of revenge does not mean the wrong was acceptable. It means we are no longer willing to let that wrong rule our hearts.
We may never know how God handles the judgment and justice. That’s hard. We like visible consequences. We like closure. We like to know that the person who hurt us understands exactly what they did and what’s happening to them because of it.
But forgiveness often means releasing our demand to manage the outcome.
There are powerful public examples of this. In 2006, in the village of Nickel Mines near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, members of the Amish community reached out to the widow of the man who shot 10 girls in their schoolhouse, and some attended his funeral.
Just two days after Dylann Roof killed nine people at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston in 2015, surviving members of the church spoke at his bond hearing. They didn’t express anger. They offered him forgiveness and said they were praying for his soul.
I pray that you and I never have to test our ability to forgive to that extent. But we can learn from people who did.
We cannot change the past. We can only decide how we are going to live in the future. And we can choose whether we live consumed by bitterness and anger, or whether we move toward the peace and freedom that forgiveness makes possible.
The fifth thing that can help us walk the path of forgiveness is pray.
I know, I said prayer was the first thing. It’s also the last thing. It’s what we keep doing.
When you are trying to forgive, prayer is essential because you cannot do this alone. God wants us to forgive, and he will help us do it, but we have to ask and let him guide us.
Matthew 18 gives us a powerful picture of this. Peter came to Jesus and asked how many times he should forgive someone who sins against him. Up to seven times?
Jesus answered in Matthew 18:22:
“I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (Matthew 18:22, NIV):
Jesus knew forgiveness would not be easy for us. That’s why he taught Peter to keep doing it.
Forgiveness is a process. It is not one and done. We need prayer to help us through the process.
So pray for the strength and wisdom you need to forgive. And as difficult as it may be, pray for the person you are forgiving.
One concern with a list like this is that it can make forgiveness sound linear, as though you do step one, then step two, then step three, and by the end everything is finished.
Forgiveness is rarely that neat.
You may do these things in a different order. You may do several at the same time. You may circle back to the same prayer over and over. That does not mean you’re failing. It means you are walking through a real process with a real wound.
And forgiveness doesn’t mean you have to accept, agree with, or tolerate the behavior of the person who harmed you.
If you’re in an abusive situation, please get out of it and get help. Forgive the abuser, but do not let the abuse continue.
If someone attacks you because of your beliefs, your values, your faith, or your point of view, you can forgive them without agreeing with them.
Forgiveness is not permission for someone to keep hurting you. It’s not denial. It’s not weakness. It’s not pretending the wound was small when it was not.
Forgiveness is obedience to God. It’s also a path to freedom.
Maybe something here has made you think about someone you need to forgive. Maybe it’s someone from years ago. Maybe it’s someone from this week. Maybe it’s someone who has never apologized and never will.
Start with prayer. Look honestly at what happened. Ask God what good he can bring from it. Let go of getting even. Keep praying.
And remember this: forgiving does not mean forgetting.
We should not forgive and forget.
We should forgive and learn.
Forgive and grow.
Forgive and let go.
Forgive and be set free.
I’ll be back in a moment with this week’s real life tip.
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This week’s real life tip is about taking pictures.
Or maybe it’s about NOT taking pictures.
There are plenty of good reasons to take pictures, both at professional events and in our personal lives. Photos help us remember who was there, what happened, and why it mattered. They give us something useful to share on social media, in newsletters, on websites, and with people who couldn’t be there. And in our families and friendships, they help preserve moments we may want to look back on years from now.
So I am not saying don’t take pictures.
But I am saying don’t let everything become about the pictures.
I’m not very good at remembering to take photos. And I have never mastered the art of taking a selfie with my phone.
That’s true for me at professional events, and it’s true in my personal life, too.
We’ve had a few family events recently where we said our goodbyes, got in the car, and then Jerry and I looked at each other and said, “We didn’t take any pictures.”
What we did was stay in the moment.
We enjoyed the time together. We talked. We laughed. We paid attention to the people in front of us instead of trying to document every part of the experience.
And that’s the tip.
Yes, photographs let us capture memories. They let us share our experiences with others. They can be valuable, meaningful, and even important.
But don’t let the picture become more important than the moment.
Take the photo, then put the phone down. Be where you are. Listen to the conversation. Notice the people. Enjoy the experience while you’re actually having it.
And one more related tip: If someone in the group is always the primary photographer—in our family, of course it’s Jerry—make an effort to get that person into some of the pictures, too. The person preserving the memories should be part of the memories.
Pictures matter. But the life we’re photographing matters more.
Thanks for being here. See you next week.