Overcoming Disappointment

God Hears Her Podcast

Episode 176 – Overcoming Disappointment with Lisa Victoria Fields

Vivian Mabuni and Elisa Morgan with Lisa Victoria Fields

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Lisa: That disappointment around the peace that I’m supposed to have. I talk about peace in the book as this three-tiered thing: that it’s peace with God, peace with people, and peace within. And sometimes we want peace within, without doing the work of peace with people. And so we’re like, I’m trying to skip over the healing part, the forgiveness part, the working through the ugliness of the betrayal. But I want inner peace. And God is like, no, you can’t do that. You don’t get to skip steps. You have to be at peace with Me, which is the work He’s done on the cross. And if we accept His work, then we can have peace with Him.

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Eryn Eddy Adkins: You’re listening to God Hears Her, a podcast for women where we explore the stunning truth that God hears you. Join our community of encouraging one another and learning to lean on God through Scripture, story, and conversation at Godhearsher.org. God hears her. Seek and she will find. 

Elisa: Lisa Victoria Fields is the author of a book, When Faith Disappoints, The Gap Between What We Believe and What We Experience. Oh! Dun, dun, dun! I mean, that is just like real life, huh? Huh, Viv? 

Vivian: Oh, yeah. 

Elisa: But more than that, she is also the CEO of the Jude 3 Project. So, Lisa, welcome. We’re so glad that you’re with us, and I’d love for you to start out and go ahead and unpack the Jude 3 Project. And then we’ll roll it back to who you are. Okay, but I kind of set that up cause I’m curious. 

Lisa: Yes. So Jude 3 Project is a Christian apologetics organization, really dedicated to helping Black Christians, specifically, know what they believe and why they believe it. And also encompassed in our mission is to engage skeptics who have questions around the faith. And so we do equipping, educating, and engaging. And so that’s what we’ve been doing. This year is our tenth year doing this work. And so I’m just thankful that God used me to do a work like this. 

Vivian: Well, we would love to hear some of your backstory, Lisa, like tell us a little of your spiritual journey.

Lisa: Yeah. So I never wanted to do this. This wasn’t on my career path …uh…

Elisa: Welcome to life, right? Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah. I’m a pastor’s kid. So I’ve been to church my whole life, and one would assume just because I’m a pastor’s kid that I want to go in ministry, but that was the furthest from my mind. In fifth grade, I played the stock market game because I was in a magnet program, and I wanted to be a stockbroker.

Elisa: Wow!

Lisa: So from the fifth grade, I was one of those kids that knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. People would ask me, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” “Be a stockbroker, move to New York City, and work on Wall Street.” And God has a sense of humor because that’s not what I’m doing right now. And He knows better than I do because I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. And I thought, you know, moving to New York was this great thing. And now that I’ve visited New York, I’m like, I never want to live here! So God knew what I… what I would actually want better than I knew at the time. And so it wasn’t until I got to college… I… I came to faith early on, teen years. I always say, because you’re a PK, you’re always going to revival so you end up giving your life over to God at every altar call. So you’re like, I don’t know which one took. 

Elisa: So you’re doubly, triply, quadruply saved. Yay! 

Vivian: Just in case.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. You go to every youth revival …um… And you’re like, I got to get my life right with God. But it wasn’t until college where I feel like faith became my own, like it wasn’t my parents’ faith. It was my faith. And it was really going through what I call the crucible of doubt, when I was in that New Testament class at the University of North Florida. My parents taught me the Bible. I knew the Bible, so I… I was an investment finance major. I was taking New Testament as an elective, and I was thinking this is going to be an easy A, I’ll get to learn some new terminology. It’s not going to be anything hard. Well, I didn’t realize before taking the course that New Testament in a university is different than Sunday school. My faith was completely rocked, and I was asking all these questions, like: can I trust the Bible? Do we really know the authorship? All of those questions that I’d never thought critically about, just being in my church bubble. My dad saw me struggling, introduced me to apologetics, and then that cultivated a desire in me to learn more. And I didn’t see many African Americans leading in the space, and that really created this passion to bridge the gap for my community in apologetics. And so that kind of led me down a path of switching my major. I would subsequently go into… I would go into banking because I needed the job after I graduated, so I worked for Bank of America and Merrill Lynch. And then, on a whim. I felt the leading of the Lord to quit my job in 2012, which was a faith move. And I moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, did my MDiv, and the last year of seminary started the Jude 3 Project. 

Elisa: You also have dipped your toe and your heart in a topic that a lot of us find ourselves absolutely drowning in. And that’s a sense of, even though we may know apologetically what we believe about God, our experience of God can be different or in contrast to what we know. And, you know, you talk about being disappointed with God. When’s the time that this started hitting your life as a PK, as a… a single woman, as a very accomplished human who’s been following after God and led into really understanding your faith? How does disappointment play a role? 

Lisa: Yeah. So disappointment, I think it’s an ever present companion in our walk with the Lord, because we have these expectations about how life is going to go, and they never quite meet those expectations.

Elisa: So good!

Lisa: And even when we get the desires of our heart, sometimes it still doesn’t look like what we think it will look like or what we think it will feel like. And so you wrestle with these disappointments. I think about even starting Jude 3 and the challenges of fundraising and the disappointment around God. I feel like You’ve called me to this. and there’s a gap between what I feel like You’ve told me and the bank account, what I’m actually experiencing 

Vivian: Yes, yes!

Lisa: And trying to grapple with that reality of like, I’m being faithful to You. And so why is this the outcome? And that’s some of the disappointment I’ve had to wrestle with as a ministry leader. Personally, relational disappointment — a guy that I dated for a while, and then him getting married to someone else in the middle of our relationship. All of…

Elisa: Oh! How painful!

Lisa: … All of those have been disappointing moments in my life that I’ve had to walk through and really be open with the Lord about my frustration with Him. Because, ultimately… usually we take our frustration out on people, but our deeper frustration is with the Lord. It’s more comfortable to take it out on a person. We kind of feel like this angst or like, I can’t take it to the Lord. But that’s really, for a lot of Christians, where their frustration and anger really is directed towards. 

Vivian: I think so many times our picture of God is that we have to kind of get our act together before we approach Him. Instead of being able to see like at the deepest disappointment, it’s actually an entry point into intimacy with God, but it requires an actual faith in Him that is a fresh faith. Because I think about even just the story of the loaves and the fishes, that Jesus could have, if He wanted to, in the same way that He did the water to wine — like huge, big containers full of water that He instantaneously turned into the finest wine. He could have made mountains of fish and mountains of bread, and then you just get… kind of get the, you know, the cafeteria style. Like everyone take your plate and grab a couple things, and feed thousands upon thousands …

Elisa: …Easily, and keep talking, keep teaching.

Vivian: Right? And instead it was like they broke the bread, they broke the fish, and each group of 50 needed to wait and trust. And is it… is it going to run out? And they didn’t know that there’d be 12 baskets left over. But I think that that fresh faith, because every single time… so even, you know, as… as a missionary, my husband and I have been on staff needing to raise financial support for the last 35 years. And it never happens the same way. And I think that the reason why is that God doesn’t want us to rely on a formula, or rely on the past, or rely on our gifting. Like He really wants us to rely on Him. And that is so challenging because we don’t like to trust sometimes. Like, I mean, you mentioned a relationship, uh, that didn’t go the way you wanted. So that story, or even another that’s just been particularly poignant for you in this whole writing of this book and this topic. 

Lisa: Yeah. So, uh, the relational one was hard. That happened over 10 years ago. And I was telling someone, I think it took me over 10 years to write about it from a healthy place; cause I believe that when you’re healed, you tell the story differently. 

Elisa: That’s a good point.

Lisa: And so I was dating this guy in my early twenties, and we had been dating for almost four years. And he, the… in the midst of the relationship, he was having an affair with a woman. And I didn’t know about it. And then they got married without telling me.

Elisa: Oh Lisa! What?!

Lisa: So that Saturday night… It was a Saturday in March. We met at a Starbucks, and we never went in. We just sat in the parking lot and talked. He never mentioned he was getting married. The next day I got a call on a Sunday from a mutual friend that told me he got married. 

Elisa: Oh gosh!

Lisa: And that was devastating! It was earth shattering because he was not just a regular guy. He was a preacher. 

Vivian: Oh, Lisa! 

Lisa: And the woman that he was with was also a preacher. And so there was layers of deception and confusion and all of these things because I grew up a PK. And I just assumed my dad is a standup guy. He’s the same at home and in the world, so I just assumed that it was the same. I think God was trying to warn me. And even my dad was trying to give me wisdom; cause my dad was just like…he would point out certain things. And I just, you know, when you’re young, you don’t listen. 

Elisa: [laughing] Yes!  Been there. Yep. Yep. Yep.

Vivian: We can all attest. 

Lisa: And so my heart was really shattered. I just… I didn’t see it coming, and it was so random. The woman was always around in the background, but I knew she was married. So it just kind of like… I wasn’t putting two and two together. Now that I look back, I’m like, duh, this was obvious in your face! And so that really was crushing to me, and it took therapy. It took time. Eventually he apologized, and we’re able to heal. I mean, we’re cool now. We’re not like BFFs. We don’t talk, but I’ve seen him from time to time, and it’s good. And it’s just that, to me, a testament of the ways in which God can heal deep brokenness that comes from disappointment if we lean into Him. And it takes time. I won’t say it’s easy. I won’t say it’s like, oh, I forgive you. That happened in 2011. 

Elisa: You’ve had to do your work. How did you tie that to God? How did disappointment with this guy who had been in your life significantly and deeply disappointed you, how did that connect to becoming disappointment with God? 

Lisa: Well, really, I think around peace. That disappointment around the peace that I’m supposed to have. Like, I feel like God, You’ve said that You will give us peace that surpasses understanding; but this gives me so much angst, so much frustration. And the bitterness that comes from this robs me of my peace. And so I really had to really reframe peace and my understanding of peace and realize… I talk about peace in the book as this kind of like this three-tiered thing that is peace with God, peace with people, and peace within. And sometimes we want peace within, without doing the work of peace with people. And so we’re like I’m trying to skip over the healing part, the forgiveness par, the working through the ugliness of the betrayal. But I want inner peace. And God is like no you can’t do that. You don’t get to skip steps. You have to be at peace with Me, which is the work He’s done on the cross. And if we accept His work, then we can have peace with Him. But then there’s the work that we have to do, which is peace with people. And that’s the work that’s hard that we want to skip. We’re like, I’ve confessed, I’m a Christian. We want to skip over two, and we want to go straight to three. And God is like, no, no, no, no. That’s not how I rigged this. 

Elisa: Honest. Yeah.

Lisa: And so that was really God showing me that it’s not just you accepting the work I’ve done, and you getting inner peace. There’s some work you have to do. And that really helps me understand peace on a different level.

Vivian: That is so much wisdom, too, because I think about our country currently, so polarized. I think about the desire that I think generally most Christians want to have inner peace. I think even non-Christians want inner peace. But that’s just wisdom that we were hardwired to be in relationship with each other and to have shalom. My husband is part native Hawaiian. He’s Okinawan and also Portuguese. Very handsome. …um… But the Hawaiian word that’s akin to shalom is pono. Our dog is named Pono, P-O-N-O. And it’s not just peace, like shalom. But shalom is like integrity, like the wholeness; and pono means that you’re good with creator, you’re good with the land, and you’re good with one another. So when he and his brother would fight, you know, and they would make up, his mom would ask, “Are you pono with each other?” You know, it’s like that sense; but I think it’s… it’s just… it’s this integrity of the whole. And we can’t… you’re right, Lisa, we can’t skip. And yet I feel like so many people are trying to take the shortcut and do self-care, self-care, self-care, which is important. But we can’t really experience that… the peace that you’re talking about, in its fullness, without having to do the work. So that’s just so much wisdom. Wow!

Elisa: And you know what? I love that you shared that it took a long time. That the disappointment with Him, the disappointment with God, the healing from that. And you said, “and I didn’t talk about it for a long time because I didn’t want to talk about it from a place of unhealth.” The wisdom, Viv, that you’re seeing, you know, and that you’re accentuating that… that Lisa shared with us came from doing that work. I mean, disappointment with God is real. It is so real. And, in fact, Lisa, I think, you know, peace is one of the pain points that you’ve identified. There are many others. And maybe would you tell us about another element, another experience of being disappointed with God?  

Lisa: Yeah. So I think about purpose. I think purpose is such a big pain point in our culture. Everybody’s looking for purpose. It’s been commercialized, like there’s a book on every shelf about purpose. There’s a lot of angst around it. What’s my purpose? What has God called me to do? And I think when I talk about purpose in the book, I talk about what purpose is not going to do for you. Because I think a lot of people are trying to find purpose out of their pain. And that if they find something that becomes like purposeful from their pain, like God used me to be able to speak to thousands of people from this painful experience, that will heal me. And I’m trying to debunk that myth, that you finding a silver lining in the horrors of your trauma won’t necessarily mean that that heals you from the traumatic experience. And it doesn’t mean that, even if God does bring you before thousands from your trauma, that doesn’t mean every trauma in your life will produce that. And I want people to understand that we need to have realistic expectations around the pain points in our lives, that they are not what is going to heal us. Only Jesus can heal us. During the midst of COVID, I lost two people that were really dear to me — my grandfather and my mentor, all within a week. And this was also the time that Jude 3… God decided to actually expedite our growth during COVID. And so I’m walking (quote-unquote) “in my purpose” and dealing with pain at the same time. This bittersweet tension that most people don’t realize that, often when very sweet things are going on in your life, there are also bitter moments attached to them. And everybody’s praising the sweet things that they can see when you’re walking around with this bitterness that they can’t. And you have to hold those things together in tension. And so purpose wasn’t an escape from my pain. It didn’t solve the pain because just because God is doing great things with the ministry, that doesn’t absolve me from the pain that I’m wrestling with for my grandfather and my mentor. Like those things coexist. The only person that can bring healing is Jesus. He’s the only one that could heal your sin-sick soul, your broken heart, whatever’s going on. It is through Him only, not something we achieve. 

Elisa: How does He heal them? You know, what does that process look like, Lisa? You know, how do we receive it? Go to Him? 

Lisa: Yeah, great question. I think there are some pains so deep that words can’t get to. Like I know that so many people are in very painful situations, and whatever I write is not going to be enough to hit some of the depths of people’s pains. And the only thing I knew to do with the end of each chapter was give them a kind of a prayer that is transparent, a guide to pray like, God, I feel like You failed me. I feel like You don’t … like prayer doesn’t work. I feel like this whole thing is a fraud, a scam. Like just being honest with God about that. I feel like You let me down. I feel like You didn’t protect me. I feel like You’re not who You say You are. I tell people, “You have to get it out your mouth to get it out your heart.”

Elisa: Hm.

Vivian: That’s good. It’s good.

Lisa: It is deep in your heart, so you get it out your mouth. He already knows. That’s one step — venting to Him. But I love that James says, “Confess your faults one to another and pray for one another that you may be healed.” My dad said a long time ago, “Confession to God brings forgiveness of sin. Confession to man is how we get healed.” God has rigged us for community. And going back to the point about peace, we try to escape it. Like I want to get healed in isolation. And I know you got hurt in community, but God is going to use community to heal you. And so it’s confession to God, confession to one another. It’s through prayers to God and prayers in community that we get the healing. And so many of us stay broken. We don’t get the inner healing because we’re so scared. We’re scared to confess like God, He’s going to strike me down with lightning if I confess. Scared to confess with people, they’re going to gossip about me. They’re going to tell my business to other people. They’re not going to understand. And all of those things could be true, but it is worth what you may suffer wrong to get on the other side, to get healing. You don’t share your business with everyone. You ask God to give you wisdom on someone you can confide in. If you are just so scared that you can’t share it with anyone, if you have the means, at least try therapy first. I don’t think therapy is the be all, the ends all, because you need community… 

Vivian: That’s right.

Lisa: …that’s walking with you daily. So it is a part of healing, but it’s not the whole of healing. And so maybe the first step for you, if you’re just so crippled by fear and can’t answer in community, is to talk to a therapist first. Not as the… the end goal, but as you… as a first step to getting back in community.

Elisa: Yeah, like an on ramp. I think it’d be really cool if we went around and nudged each other to share: What is the question you’re asking of God right now? I’ll go first. God, is it really that important for me to be in community? I’m old and I love people, but sometimes I just want to be with me. So can I just skip out of community? That’s the question that I’m asking God right now, and maybe somebody else is asking that. Community is a lot of work. Okay. What are you guys asking? 

Lisa: I’m asking, “how long?” There’s a particular prayer request that I’m just like God I feel like You have me praying on this. You’ve specifically given direction to pray for this, and to see a change, especially with a particular person. It’s just like, how long am I going to be praying for this? How long am I going to be interceding? How long are You going to shift things? And that’s been my question for God, like, how long is this going to take? Because I’m ready to wrap it up. 

[Laughter]

Elisa: I’ve… I’ve had enough, yeah. 

Vivian: Yeah. Mine kind of dovetails off of that, Lisa. My, my daughter, my youngest daughter has an alarm set on her phone to remind her to pray. And at 12:12, she prays for friends that don’t know the Lord and just, you know, that’s her time to pray. And so I have three people that I pray for at 12:12 in, you know, just kind of following her lead. And I really struggle with like, What if what I am praying for is not the outcome? What if these people that I care so much about don’t choose to follow You? You know, and that is really pressing on my heart. Am I okay if they don’t respond? Because I don’t feel like I’m going to be okay. And what does that say of You, God, in terms of answering prayer and being faithful? And yes, I understand there’s free will, but still I’m just, You can change the hearts of the Kings in Proverbs, you know? So it’s… there’s a real wrestling with the reality, like people I care so much about, what if they don’t choose You? And that’s my question. 

Elisa: So just in that, Lisa, is that what it looks like? 

Lisa: I think it’s… it’s really that simple, especially doing that in community. And it’s the shared experience, like you, Vivian, knowing that I’m going through something similar. And it’s like, okay, this isn’t just me. You know, it normalizes the experience because so many of us are going through similar things, but we, the enemy in isolation tells us we’re the only person going through this, or this is only happening to you. And it’s like, no, we’re… All of these are shared experiences, and it really binds us together in community because we have like this shared struggle. And it helps us grow in community because I think about… Jesus said, I’ve been able to keep all of them except one, that it was so important that they stay in relationship with not only Him, but each other, like the prayer that we be one, even as Him and the father are one, the whole Godhead is a community that we should reflect. And God is like, I’m not just concerned about your relationship with Me. I’m concerned about your relationship with one another. And I give you shared struggles for you to be bound together with one another.

[Theme music]

Elisa: We can practically overcome disappointment by identifying our pain points, giving our pain to God, and being in community. 

Vivian: I love how honest Lisa was, and this episode was just so helpful. Before we go, be sure to check out our show notes for a link to the Jude 3 Project, where you can learn more about Lisa and buy her book, When Faith Disappoints. Find that and more at GodHearsHer.org. That’s GodHearsHer.org. 

Elisa: And if you liked this episode, or if you’ve been listening to the show for a bit, please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Be sure to share your favorite episodes on social media or with a friend. 

Vivian: Thanks for joining us, and don’t forget God hears you, He sees you, and He loves you because you are His.

Elisa: Today’s episode was engineered by Anne Stevens and produced by Jade Gusman and Mary Jo Clark. We also want to thank Russ, Milo, and Lily for all their help and support. Thanks everyone. 

Vivian: Our Daily Bread Ministries is a donor-supported, nonprofit ministry dedicated to making the life changing wisdom and stories of the Bible come alive for all people around the world.

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Vivian: God Hears Her is a production of Our Daily Bread Ministries.