Frustrating Frustrations

So the other day I was getting ready to leave the parking lot of my family’s favorite Mexican restaurant in town (El Poblano on Rocky Ridge Road) and was attempting to get my young children quickly into the car and ready to go.  Everyone was ready to roll except my son in the back seat.  He was attempting to buckle his seat belt completely unaided but it wasn’t going very well.  He pulled the strap tight and tried to get the metal buckle into the latch.  He missed the narrow slit in the latch.  He tried again only to no avail.  I was watching him become increasingly frustrated.  He tried again but at that point wasn’t even looking at the buckle and was just straining as hard as he could with his eyes closed and his bottom lip poked out.  I sat and watched this spectacle for a few seconds, which became a semi-comical scene to me.  But after several failed attempts and realizing that I would have to climb all the way into the backseat from the front, my amusement rapidly turned to frustration.  “Son, take your time, look at what your doing and try again,” I said to him with increasing irritation.  My son finally triumphed over the seat belt but by the end of the whole thing, we were both pretty frustrated.  Ever wonder why life can be so frustrating?

From icemakers that don’t work right, to dogs that bark too much and children that break things, life often seems like a series of frustrating events.  And on top of the mundane, every day frustrations, we have to deal with soul-crushing experiences of frustration filled with heart-ache and pain—infertility, cancer, sexual brokenness, divorce, loss and the list goes on and on.  Every day on earth, it is a virtual certainty that we will experience frustration.  But if we take a closer look under the hood of our frustration, what will we find?  After reflecting on the universal experience of frustration, I have come up with the following explanations to help you understand what is going on inside when we feel frustrated.

Let’s start with a basic definition of frustration.  What is frustration?  Frustration is what we experience when our desires have been thwarted, when something doesn’t go the way we want or the way we think it should go and we are anxious and angry as a result.  Frustration, like anger or suffering, is a universal human experience that we all share and spans the entire length of our human lives.  Frustration easily wells up inside of us and rarely if ever does a day go by when we do not feel frustrated about some situation, person or thing.  When we think more deeply about the every-day experience of frustration in light Scriptural teaching, there are at least three things about frustration we notice.  

First, frustrations reveal our impatience and lack of control.  We want things to be just the way we want and we want them to be that way right now.  Every day we are faced with things that don’t go our way and we experience frustration as a result.  A daily frustration for me is the significant time involved in my commute to work.  As much as you think I would have learned this lesson by now, my daily frustration with long, slow moving lines in traffic reveals that I’m not in control of something as basic as going from point a to point b.  Frustration constantly makes us confront the reality that we are not in control, that we are finite, limited and bound to circumstances outside of ourselves.  In short, much of our frustration comes from being confronted with our weaknesses and lack of control – the fact that we are not God.  It’s significant to note that if you look up the word frustrate in a Bible concordance, almost every instance involves people’s plans being frustrated by the Sovereign God, the One who reigns and rules over the world.  From the Bible’s perspective, God is the only Being in the universe who is never frustrated because of His infinite nature (“The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the people,” Ps. 33:10).  We can begin to face and move past many of our frustrations by daily confessing and embracing who we are—limited, finite creatures who simply don’t have control over all the things we wish we had control over.  It’s when we seek to grasp power or control that belongs to God that we become so frustrated.

Second, our frustrations reveal our selfishness, a life bent towards ourselves.  The great church theologian Augustine once wrote that one of the more tragic effects of sin is that it makes us bent in toward ourselves.  We as sinners have a tendency to shrink God’s entire world into our narrow desires that revolve ourselves.  We often cannot fathom that other people would not be as interested as we are in our pursuit of getting all the things we want.  This kind of frustration surfaces especially in our relationships.  When I reflect on frustration I experience with my children, I am confronted with the reality that many times what I am most irritated with is not the fact they have done something wrong but that they have made demands upon my time and energy.  Every day I feel my heart gravitating toward frustration when God calls me to serve someone other than myself.  I can feel frustration begin to well in up inside when I have to clean up the spill I didn’t make, fix something someone else broke and patiently answer a question that has already been asked ten times.  The frustrations we often feel with our children and family life can be a wonderfully good tool in helping diagnose whether or not we are seeking to live for God’s kingdom or ourselves.  Similarly in marriage, what often fuels conflicts and fights are careless words spoken out of frustration, a frustration that primarily revolves around simply not getting what you want in the way you want it.  The good news of the gospel is that God calls us to live another way, a way that puts to death our selfish frustrations.  Paul states this best, “…and he [Jesus] died for all that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised,” (2 Corinthians 5:15).

Third, our frustrations reveal our deep longing for God to fully and finally redeem our broken world.  Although, much of our frustration comes from a selfish heart, this does not exhaust the source of all our frustration.  Throughout the Scriptures, we can see that God’s people often experience frustration as they wait on God to act on their behalf.  We can see this dynamic in the oft-repeated cry of “How long, O LORD?” throughout the Psalms.  In this sense, our frustration isn’t sinful but a sign that deep down in our souls we know that God’s world isn’t the way it should be.  This is a frustration that comes from an accurate assessment of the way the world currently is and the way it should be.  Paul in Romans chapter eight uses the word groaning (Romans 8:22-23) to describe this experience of inner struggle and pain as we eagerly await God’s final work of redemption in the resurrection of the dead.  This frustration comes from our longing for God to fully redeem our world and recreate it into a place without messes, tears, suffering and death. And so as Christians, this means that a part of growing in wisdom involves learning to become frustrated at the right things.  As God sanctifies us, we should become less frustrated that God calls us to sacrificially give of ourselves.  Instead we should feel frustrated by the fact that the world is a place where people love evil instead of goodness, a place where we would rather be served than serve and a place that is filled with suffering and tragedy.

In my favorite chapter of the Bible (Revelation 21), we get to glimpse the stunning conclusion to God’s story of redemption and see the future of frustration.  In this passage, the Apostle John describes in vivid detail God’s coming new heavens and new earth, the place where God will put an end to all our frustrations.  In this coming day, John hears a heavenly voice proclaiming that “…God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away,” (Rev. 21:4).  John’s vision of the coming future of every Christian provides a crucial perspective on our frustrations—they are temporary and will one day disappear forever.  We can temper our frustrations in the here and now by keeping this coming future before us, this coming day when our heavenly Father will frustrate all our frustrations and create a world where frustration is no longer a part of the human experience.