Frustrations.

Good morning. Tuesday, Feb 10, 2009. Yesterday we have been discussing frustrations. It is not a topic you could finish in one day - of course you cannot finish it in a couple of lines either! Frustrations are there, sometimes. Strong frustrations are there. Frustra is Latin and means something like “you have done it without getting anything out of it”, I have learned that in school. Not every action humans do leads to the desired result. Many things just lead into nothing. That is what we would call “risk”. Risk means that things can work out fine and you get a high reward, but they can also work out badly and you loose a lot. You cannot have high gain without high risk - that's what financial markets have shown, the house markets, the world economy.

Can faith help in frustrations? I mean: when you try some things and they do not work out fine? Is faith a cheap consolation? What is behind faith?

In the Psalms we find a lot of frustration. The writer is angry about the injustice of the world, the injustice of fate. But all these songs have a special outcome. They do not stay in frustration. The writer is not bound by the events and circumstances. He pulls himself out of it, gets back to a different kind of reality, the real one. Frustrations are not the end, but the beginning of real hope. Real hope is a hope which trusts in the Lord, in the God of the universe. If frustrations lead to this type of future, we should even search them and look for them, they will heal us of false securities!

[R.P., Reading, UK]

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