I’m Frustrated!

I have to admit, I’m frus­trated. And this is where I’m going to express my frus­tra­tion, to my great dis­may… and frustration.

I’m frus­trated because I’m in an envi­ron­ment I wouldn’t have cho­sen to be in, out­side of my wife and I being called to where we are (in this case, Que­bec). I’m frus­trated because the peo­ple can be dif­fi­cult, the gov­ern­ment is non­sen­si­cal (they are in the process of try­ing to force my wife to re-take her maiden name), and I don’t really have a choice in the mat­ter. In some ways this fol­lows up my pre­vi­ous post “But why, God?” with “What are you think­ing, God?” I think a large part of “things” is that remind­ing myself that “God is in con­trol” (other’s remind­ing me of this as well) isn’t a com­fort­ing — as I sus­pect it should be — thought. It can be a dif­fi­cult thing com­ing to terms with the sit­u­a­tion we knew we would be get­ting our­selves into, and I imag­ine this would be the same for many oth­ers as well. Before com­ing, I knew that I wasn’t going to be par­tic­u­larly fond of where we were mov­ing, but also thought that I would find it eas­ier than I have to get into the “swing” of things. I’m frus­trated because I can’t fig­ure out what to write on, and when­ever I do write some­thing I don’t like it. I’m frus­trated because I feel like — and it’s prob­a­bly true — I don’t know any­thing. So the ques­tion becomes, how do I deal with frustration?

Well, if I had to guess I would say that frus­tra­tion, much like worry, is in some way reflec­tive of how much one trusts, or does not trust, God. It’s very easy to say, “trust God more,” and it’s quite hard to do so in prac­tice (result­ing, per­haps, in frus­tra­tion, or worry, or stress?). At the same time, I don’t think frus­tra­tion is always a reflec­tion of how much one trusts God. Hope­fully not sound­ing arro­gant, I don’t really have much of a prob­lem “trust­ing” God with why I’m here, though I’m still frus­trated with it–I believe it’s because I’m here, even though some part of me still doesn’t want to be here (I would much more pre­fer to be in Europe, and by that I mean the UK). I think in the back of my mind it’s a wrestling match between “I’m frus­trated…” and “Yes, but you know God is in con­trol, so just let it go and have peace with it”. Inter­spersed are the most obvi­ous thoughts, things like, “even though you’re frus­trated, you still have to love the peo­ple there”. And quite hon­estly, I think I answer back, “but I don’t want to” more than I answer back “yes”. Whether we take the exam­ple of Abra­ham, or Joseph, or David, or Jesus, I sup­pose it really all just comes down to trust­ing God. I don’t think there’s much more to it, except per­haps the valu­able prac­tice of express­ing how one feels (i.e. Lamen­ta­tions, the Psalms).

So in that way I apol­o­gize if I seemed to have com­plained (or been too trans­par­ent), as this is still a good thing to keep in mind, and prob­a­bly some­thing we all need remind­ing of.

Related posts:

1. Frus­tra­tion