Jonathon Clinesmith

You already know what disappointment feels like.

You know it in the job that didn't work out, the relationship that didn't last, the prayer that went unanswered for so long you eventually stopped praying it. You know it in the church that was supposed to be safe and wasn't, the God who was supposed to show up and seemed not to, the world that keeps falling devastatingly short of what it was clearly meant to be.

What if that ache is trying to tell you something?

In The Deeply Spiritual Act of Being Disappointed, pastor and author Jonathon Clinesmith makes a surprising and stubbornly hopeful argument: that disappointment isn't the enemy of faith. It might be its deepest expression. That the gap between what is and what should be isn't just something to survive — it's a compass, pointing us toward the God who made us for more than this, and toward the life we were actually built to live.

Moving from the empty lakebeds of the Oklahoma Panhandle to the ruins of ancient Babylon, from a grieving woman weeping outside an empty tomb to a little girl smiling in a refugee school in Jordan, this book takes disappointment seriously without letting it have the last word. It's for the person who has been hurt by the church but hasn't stopped believing. For the person who prays into silence and keeps praying anyway. For the person who looks at the broken world and feels, underneath the exhaustion, the stubborn sense that things aren't supposed to be this way — and that the feeling itself might be holy.

This is not a book about how to stop being disappointed.

It's a book about what to do with it.