Frustration and Purpose: An Unlikely Partnership
Then the people of the land weakened the hands of the people of Judah and hired counsellors against them to frustrate their purpose – Ezra 4:4, 5
Frustration. Such an ugly word, yet you’ll hear the sound of its name pronounced in some form or other, its praises ringing like a chorus to the culprit responsible for the slow-down or stoppage of any good work in progress. Any undertaking of something positive or worthwhile will sooner or later find itself scheduled for a twelve round title fight with frustration… or maybe in some cases it’s a street brawl or just an all out war complete with the tragic stories of casualties that are all too familiar during times of war.
Indeed an encounter with frustration can be fatal, especially to your dreams that you once hotly pursued with all of the excitement that comes from finding something that it feels like you were born to do and knowing that you’ve been given an extraordinary gift, and that your life is going somewhere, and that you were created for something great… YES!!! Your very being has been infused by purpose and you dream passionately of your God-given goal. You muse about what it will look and feel like once you have reached the reality of what you have so far only seen in brief glimpses and fleeting visions.
So you set out on your journey, and quickly realize that the smooth trail that you surveyed from afar is immensely more rugged and treacherous upon closer inspection. And as you travel you find the going is sometimes slow, and other times it’s all you can do to hold ground and not retreat.
When taking a step back and looking at the larger picture, I’ve begun to gain some perspective about what frustration really is and why it comes about. In my few short years, I’ve had many a tangle with frustration, and I can honestly say that I ABSOLUTELY HATE IT! The feelings, the struggle, the whole experience… it’s all so negative and adverse to everything good. But it must be as necessary as it is deadly.
What is frustration? What makes it so loathsome and irritating? What makes it so effective in derailing such noble efforts? I’ve given some thought and analysis to the frustrating moments in my own life in hopes of answering some of these questions for myself, in preparation for the next time we do battle.
Picture a young child attempting a seemingly simple task. The one that always comes to mind from my own childhood was a particular bout with frustration while trying to get out of a dress that had buttons all the way down the back. I remember pulling the dress over my head, and I could get out of the sleeves and everything, but ended up stuck when the collar of the dress would not go over my head. I would spend all of my energy yanking and pulling until I worked myself into a frenzy and found myself on the verge of tears because it felt like I would be trapped in this darkness forever, unable to figure out how to get free.
Looking back, it is a very silly picture, but at the time there was nothing more serious, and the feeling of frustration is almost exactly the same to this very day. The situations change, but the feeling is the same. I guess I’ll point out here, without digressing too much, that getting out of that situation was as simple as going back to the beginning and starting over, this time choosing a different path. Pulling the dress back down and putting my arms back in the sleeves, I could work on calmly loosening those top buttons, which would allow me to get the dress over my head.
That’s a simple, small-scale model of every frustrating moment I’ve ever had. I’ll be headed toward accomplishing something, when suddenly an unexpected roadblock pops up out of nowhere. So focused and intent on accomplishing my goal, I forcefully and blindly continue, determined to deny the obstacle the pleasure of stopping my progress. But I keep running into the roadblock again and again. It only takes a short time for me to tire of expending all of my energy and getting no where. That for me is the definition of frustration. Spinning your wheels, running out of gas, and finding that at the end of the day you’ve become emotional (angry, sad, desperate, despondent, depressed) and tired, and are no further along than when you started.
Frustration rises up quickly, almost in no time at all, and that’s part of what makes it so deadly. The other thing is that it comes from within. The obstacle stopping you may be outside of you, but frustration rises up within you and tries to destroy you from the inside. It exhausts everything you have to give, and challenges whether there is any redeeming value to your visions and goals or to you as a person. Sometimes the source of frustration can be a person or system, but ultimately its goal is to destroy you or stop you from going any further in the direction you’re headed. The crazy thing about it, is if frustration didn’t rise up and take over so quickly, we’d probably find that our perceived obstacle or setback isn’t as large as it appears. I’m convinced that frustration uses the flood of emotion to cloud our thinking so that we fail to use the abilities we already possess to overcome and keep moving forward.
In Ezra 4:4,5, the enemies of the Jews wanted to stop the building of the temple, so they assaulted them with words of defeat and used every available avenue to block their efforts, ultimately securing a decree from the king that represented a huge concrete barricade to the success of the project. The scripture says one of their tactics was to hire counsellors to frustrate their purpose. That hebrew word for purpose literally means counsel or advice. So they hired experts as commentators on the project, whose job it was to contradict the declaration of the Jews and their leaders. Their encouraging words were met with words of doubt and discouragement, and their orders were met with predictions of failure and fruitlessness. The atmosphere was rife with negativity and gloom, making it difficult to even keep the group motivated and unified. Matthew Henry speculates that if there were any among them who were not extremely passionate about this venture, they probably were easily discouraged at the outset, creating a burden on the rest because their contributions were still needed and it was hurtful to the whole group if they were missing from the effort.
The king’s decree seemed like a final blow to an already severely weakened effort. Where they were spinning their wheels with little progress, now everything had come to a grinding halt. Continuing did not even appear to be an option. Sometimes frustration is so great, the only cure seems to be to stop trying. If resistance is so strong and won’t let up in opposing me, then I’ll stop opposing it. If I give in, maybe then I’ll have some peace. The only problem is that the purpose for which we were created is inside of us. It is woven into the very fiber of our being. We were crafted deliberately for purpose, on purpose! It’s like a state of the art race car designed to perform at record speeds, but it’s only driven in school zones. It was created for so much more and is capable of much greater; to be permanently resigned to something so beneath its potential would be a grand waste of a very substantial investment.
So it is with us, but be encouraged! The presence of frustration is an indicator of many positive things. First, it is a pretty good sign that you are doing something worth opposing, which is likely why you’ve encountered opposition. Second, frustration seems to magnify a problem and hinder one’s ability to think clearly and rationally, so chances are if you can just diffuse the emotion (shock, disappointment, fear, hurt, and even anger), you may find that the problem wasn’t as large as it may have seemed, and it’s certainly not larger than the Creator who made you and gave you the assignment, all the while being fully aware of the fact that this problem would arise. You may just find that He has already made the way around, over, under, or through, and given you the tools you need to proceed in whatever way He has purposed for you to go.
Frustration can be an ugly thing, but since I know it’s a certain fixture on the path to purpose, I am preparing myself to recognize it and embrace it as a sign of progress, rather than a hindrance to it.
