This Thursday is an important day in Adventist history: the 176th anniversary of the Great Disappointment. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, the Great Disappointment refers to a day when thousands of people (called Millerites) thought Jesus was coming, and He didn’t. There’s more to the story--they had more Biblical research behind their hopes than today’s date-setters do, but the result was the same: no second coming, and life goes on. The more interesting part of the story, I think, is how people dealt with the Great Disappointment. Some lost their faith in God entirely, some became fanatics, and some turned to their Bibles to check their work. The modern-day Adventist church is descended from this third group, but I find this range of responses to bitter disappointment an interesting study in how people are dealing with the various disappointments of 2020. Certainly, the year 2020 has had its share of disappointments. To make it all the messier, these disappointments play out a little different for everyone, so it isn’t a unified experience like it was for the disappointed Millerites. Some lost weddings, some lost graduations, some lost face-to-face schooling, and some lost desperately desired peace, quiet, or privacy. In all cases, the year has played out very differently than it was originally planned to happen. One reaction to this has been depression. Like the Millerites who lost their faith in God, some people have reacted to this year with deep sadness and soul-searing questions. If this is you, you need to know that you are not alone. Even those who have dealt with the pandemic most productively have had seasons of feeling that loss. Unfortunately, in this pandemic, the depression rate has gone up and there has been a small rise in suicides, as well as a major increase in alcohol consumption. The important thing is to keep going and to keep life moving on. Please don’t resort to suicide--the story isn’t over. If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide and live in LA County, please call 1-877-727-4747 for a trained professional to help you talk through things. The dark corners of the mind love to seize on moments like these and drag you down. Rather than try to blot out the darkness through addiction or self-destructive behavior, it is vital to ground yourself in the things that make life worth living. Focus on and pursue those things vigilantly, and slowly the darkness will fade. Another reaction has been extremism. When people deal with intense events like the Great Disappointment or the year 2020, they sometimes adopt more extreme positions on things than they would otherwise. The fanatics of 1844 started claiming that Jesus had come in their hearts already and acted like babies. Some practiced “spiritual wifery,” which is just as creepy and suspect as it sounds. I’m not going to single out one kind of extremism here because the point is that this year has brought out the extremist in so many of us. No matter what religion or political party you belong to, you most likely can’t open your social media feed right now or turn on the news without hearing some fresh example of this extremism at work. As you encounter extremism in others, be mindful that you may have forms of it, too. Extremism appears to arise from a hasty desire to make sense of the world without taking the time to go about it in a careful, balanced way. After all, who has time for fact-checking when the world is literally on fire? (Well, California is, anyway.) We all jump to conclusions sometimes when there simply isn’t time to sift through the mountains of information hitting us from all sides. At one point, I accidentally spread misinformation about the pandemic to school children because I hadn’t done careful fact-checking. Now that I’ve had time to check it out from more reliable sources, I’ve corrected my previous statements to those same children. It’s relatively easy to do that when the issue is a matter of scientific fact, but when it touches on such sensitive and subjective topics as race, political ideology, or economics, it gets even harder for people to self-correct or to wade patiently through misunderstandings. The third reaction to disappointment is probably the healthiest, though the hardest to do. The group of Millerites that turned to their Bibles to check their work made many mistakes along the way, including a teaching that no one new could be saved--but because they kept going back to Scripture, the truth eventually won out. They patiently and prayerfully sifted through the Scriptures, rediscovering things that had been forgotten by Christians for many years. They clung to their faith and continued to sift through the facts. Life went on for them, but they did not give up hope. To get through this season of disappointments, it is vital to keep up hope, to be patient when processing what’s going on, and to cling to the realities of our faith. While it is easy to get discouraged about the seemingly unanswered prayers out there--prayer for the end of the pandemic, prayers for the wildfires to end, etc--prayer is about so much more than asking God for what we want. In times of disappointment, prayer is how we bring our feelings about the matter to God for Him to deal with. It is also how we seek His wisdom in sifting through everything that’s going on. Most importantly, it re-centers our minds on the source of all hope. 2020 and its issues will not last forever. It will either lighten up, or it will intensify until Jesus comes and deals with everything at once. Either way, we are not stuck with this. Meanwhile, life goes on.
2 Comments
marian darnell
10/21/2020 09:21:47 pm
Im still not understanding what happened? Did they misinterpreted the bible instead of Jesus coming to earth he was entering the most holy place in heaven? Was that the misinterpretation? Where can that be found in the bible. Please explain.
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Jillian Lutes
10/22/2020 07:53:19 am
So, to back up a bit, this all got started when William Miller interpreted Daniel 8:14, which reads "It will take 2300 evenings and mornings, and then the sanctuary will be cleansed," to mean that Jesus would come on October 22, 1844. Obviously, He didn't. Then everything I describe in this blog post happened.
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AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
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