A Friend Named Mike
The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Scary movies are a multimillion-dollar business in Hollywood. Maybe we just need to watch others battle zombies to gain courage for our own struggles. But I’ve learned a lot about disappointment from observation of another kind: the uncommon blessing of watching godly people handle their heartaches. And the person who has taught me the most about responding to unexpected disappointments—those gut-wrenching painful surprises I never dreamed I’d have to endure—is my friend Mike Coleman.
What made it possible for Mike to teach me? Learning from each other is part of why God gave us the church. When we come together as the body of Christ, we have the opportunity to form lasting friendships with individuals who are suffering and experience mutual encouragement. We connect and then share our stories, and in the process we pull each other up out of the pit. Proverbs tell us, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity,” and again, “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend” (Prov. 17:17; 27:17). The wisdom of going through trials with a brother or sister at your side is reinforced in Ecclesiastes 4:9–10: “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up.”
In the introduction to his translation of the book of Job, Eugene Peterson says, “We need to quit feeling sorry for people who suffer and instead look up to them, learn from them, and—if they will let us—join them in protest and prayer. Pity can be nearsighted and condescending.”1 It is vital, when you are dealing with heartache, to find someone you can learn from and they from you. How do you find those kind of friends? Someone once told me that to have a friend you must be a friend. Covenant friendships, those friendships based on a shared bond to seek God’s highest and best for each other, take years to develop, but the benefit of fellowship and accountability is immeasurable.
Mike is one of those friends. He was the CEO of Integrity Media for twenty-five years and also its cofounder. Integrity’s mission statement was “Helping people worldwide experience the manifest presence of God.” The main bread and butter of the company was worship music, and millions of lives (including my own) were touched by the songs of praise they distributed. The company’s worldwide vision of helping people experience the presence of God spread like a canopy over the globe, and Integrity music and media products were distributed in more than 160 nations.
And then the unexpected happened. New technology exploded onto the world scene that opened the door to illegal digital downloading of music. This had a devastating financial effect on the entire music industry, both Christian and secular. It’s hard to compete against free.
In 2011 Mike sold the company after years of declining sales and walked away from a life vision that had filled his heart for twenty-five years. Disappointing? Of course. But being a resilient person, Mike began to lay plans for another chapter in his life and a new season of ministry.
But again something disappointing and unexpected happened. Mike got sick. In fact, Mike got really sick. In October 2012, Mike underwent major spine surgery in his neck. After several other health complications were added to the scenario, Mike was weakened to the point where he had a difficult time driving or even walking across a room. His plans for a new season of ministry were shelved. For the next few years, at least, Mike would be physically disabled and unable to work.
How do you respond when your life vision vanishes before your eyes? What do you do when you find yourself at the crossroads of expectation and disappointment? What are you to think? Where do you go from there? How do you recover from something like that?
Mike and I connected in 2012. Maybe our friendship started because we were both in a place of adversity. Today I cherish Mike as a brother who was born to help me through my adversity, and I believe I was born to help him through his. I have learned priceless truths from Mike’s life. The uncanny thing is that in the five years I’ve been walking with him in friendship, I have never heard him express doubt in God’s love for him or bitterness about his circumstances. Rather, he is what I would call a model of extreme resilience. Here are two truths Mike has taught me that have challenged my perspective of disappointment.
First of all, Mike once told me, “Life is more defined by the unexpected than by the expected.” In other words, your character is not shaped by how you face the expected things in life but by how you face those unexpected things at the crossroads where your expectation meets disappointment. You see, you expect it to be cold in the winter so you handle it. A woman expects pain in childbirth so it helps her endure. You expect the tires on your car to wear with age, wrinkles to form on your face as you grow older, your stomach to growl when you’re hungry, and your taxes to be due on April 15. Living through these expected things doesn’t really define you. You are defined instead by how you respond to the unexpected events in your life: a stillborn baby, a sudden and tragic loss of a loved one, the loss of a business, a divorce, a child who develops an incurable disease. How we handle the unexpected is really what defines us.
Mike also gave me another golden principle that has changed my understanding of disappointment. He once said to me, “Aaron, it says in Romans 8:28, ‘And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God.’” Then he asked, “How do you define good?” My definition was shallow and, quite frankly, pathetic: “All things working together for good means that God takes all the things I’m going through—all of my pain and loss—and He works them out and in the end He gives me my life back and my things back and I’m back up on top of the world again. That’s good.”
Mike responded by saying, “Aaron, I think there is something even better than that. I think the definition of good is when you come through the pain of disappointment and joyfully discover you have been shaped a little more into the nature and character of Jesus, to the point where you are so content and fulfilled with what God has done in you that getting your treasure back is no longer a major concern. In the end, the real treasure is Jesus.”
I believe Mike is right: this is what good ultimately is. Today, Mike continues the steady climb out of his crucible and is experiencing healing and fresh vision. He now serves as the CEO of a new ministry that utilizes the power of media to reframe the state of Israel and the Jewish people in a positive light in the face of global anti-Semitism.
We all have our disappointments in life and we can’t rate our pain of disappointment by someone else’s, nor would we want to. I don’t find solace for my wounds in the unfortunate tragedy of another. The reason, of course, is that the feeling of disappointment is real—it simply doesn’t make you feel any better to compare your disappointments to Mike’s. “Oh, I feel so much better about my agony now that I’ve heard Mike’s story.” It just doesn’t work that way. So why do I share his story? It is not because of the nature of his heartache but because of how he responded to it. That’s the story.
What I want to know is how Mike came out of this. How did he write a new chapter? In every great story there are always four elements: the setting, the conflict, the climax, and the resolution. After the sale of Mike’s company and the loss of his health, did his story continue? Did he ever become strong at the broken places? Did he ever find a resolution to his heartbreak? Did he make peace with his pain?
My brother-in-law Stu wrote a tagline for his public relations company: “Because our stories become us.” That’s an apt description of human endeavor. For Mike, his season of difficulty was either going to become his story, the thing people remembered about him, the stuff from which he would never recover, or the beginning of a comeback. It would be the end—or the beginning.
In the last chapter, we learned how self-pity leads to disappointment, disappointment leads to resentment, and resentment leads to indecisiveness. It’s important to know these roadblocks work progressively. Allow self-pity to take root and disappointment is sure to follow. You may be affected by disappointment more than you think.
You Will Never Be “Dissed” from a Divine Appointment
Not only can disappointment take root in our souls because of losses like Mike endured but it can also take up residence when things don’t work out the way we planned. You might say disappointment is an appointment that never happened as expected, a dissed-appointment. However disappointment comes your way, it can leave you with feelings of abandonment and vulnerability.
Often, we blame our disappointments on God: “God, why didn’t You prevent the accident from happening? Where were You when I needed You? Are You concerned about me? Are You fair? Are You aware of what I’m going through?” We can pick up this sentiment in Martha’s disappointment in Christ for not coming sooner to the bedside of her dying brother, Lazarus: “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21).
It’s convenient for us finite humans to connect our disappointments to God’s infinite character. I mean, someone has to be responsible around here, don’t they? We passionately will things into being, thinking we’re like Jim Carey’s character, Bruce, in the film Bruce Almighty. We will into existence the American dream and a Disneyland life. Should we suddenly be awakened by the annoying alarm clock of adversity, we wonder why God didn’t create a snooze button so we could dream right through recessions, bankruptcies, splintering family conflicts, real estate short sales, and missed quotas.
Maybe we have created a god in our minds that is not God at all. A kind of great wizard behind a curtain who responds to all of our wishes and wants and keeps disappointment from even getting close to the security fence he’s erected around our lives. That’s some kind of god.
You Have a Date with Destiny
Each person who follows Christ has a divine assignment in life. Some call it a divine appointment. A friend of mine tells a story from his high school years about a girl he was secretly infatuated with. Her name was Destiny. He was love struck, and when she finally agreed to go out with him he enthusiastically announced, “Tonight, I have a date with Destiny!” This is true for Christians. Each of us has a date with destiny. Jesus confirms this in John’s Gospel: “You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit” (15:16). Each believer in Jesus has been chosen and appointed. The opposite of appointment is dis-appointment. However, Christ never dis-appoints people. He appoints and then re-appoints if we should ever miss a divine appointment, but He never dis-appoints us from our purpose. Could it be that disappointments often come our way because we make appointments with God He never agreed to? That’s like sitting in a doctor’s waiting room growing all the more discouraged when the nurse doesn’t call your name—only to realize at the end of the day that you never scheduled an appointment.
Could it be that disappointment is actually a grace? How can this be? When I am disappointed in my circumstances or in other people, the pain of that moment leads me to trust the only One who can truly satisfy the longings and dreams in my soul. And with that trust arises faith. And when my faith brings me to the place where I believe no matter what my situation that God’s love for me is perfect and His wisdom is infallible, my disappointment fades away. The Scriptures affirm this: “Whoever believes in Him will not be disappointed” (Rom. 10:11 NASB).
The agenda of disappointment is to slowly and systematically deteriorate your faith and ultimately introduce you to resentment and indecisiveness. That’s why this roadblock to your resilience must be exposed. Like self-pity, disappointment works subtly, and you may not even notice it lulling you to sleep. Its insidiousness is like an invisible gas. Coal miners knew the dangers of something so quietly dangerous as methane gas. They would take a canary with them into the mine. If the canary was singing, all was well. But if the canary seemed drowsy, dazed, or worse, the miners made a quick exit to the fresh air of the outside world, escaping certain death.
Hashtag: People Will Disappoint You
Here’s a headline for you: people are human and prone to failure. My own life was broken by someone’s selfish choice. A drunk driver took the life of my father when I was three years old. For years I questioned God and tried to understand why I had to grow up without a dad. The roadblock of self-pity was taking root in my heart, and its companions—disappointment, resentment, and indecisiveness—were sure to follow. Thankfully, I came to terms with the fact that my father was killed by a drunk driver because a flawed human being made a series of really unfortunate decisions.
We cannot change the reality that everyone around us, at one point or another, is going to disappoint us. Especially those we love the most. We are all part of the human family with all of its deficiencies. If we cannot accept human weakness and the propensity of others to disappoint us, often for unexplainable reasons, we will eventually crumble. You just can’t go on believing you, of all people, are somehow immune from the sickness spread by broken people.
Our refusal to accept disappointment in our relationships causes us to suffer unnecessary agony, like an aching sore neck or a twisted back that even a hot bath in Epsom salts can’t relieve. We simply cannot expect divinity from humanity. As a younger man, I let the failures of people in my life become roadblocks to God’s plans for me. I lay awake literally hundreds of nights pondering the odd decisions and motivations of others. How could they do something so strange? And do you know what I learned after these years of sleepless nights? One thing: I will never understand why people do what they do. Now that I’m older and wiser, I no longer experience sleepless nights of trying to contemplate others’ behaviors. I now accept the fact that other people are imperfect creatures just like me. I accept that those around me will unintentionally—and sometimes, yes, intentionally—disappointment me. And I’m okay with that.
The Discipline of Disillusionment
In his book My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers encourages us to see people as they really are: imperfect and fallible. In his devotional for July 30, entitled “The Discipline of Disillusionment,” Chambers opens with John 2:24–25: “Jesus did not commit himself unto them . . . for he knew what was in man” (KJV). And then he unveils an amazing commentary about the discipline required to keep us from being disillusioned and disappointed in others.
Chambers urges us to drop our illusions, our desire to make others the perfect cushion to all our falls and the salve to all our wounds. He says that we need to take our focus off others and instead look to our Lord as the only One who can be perfect. Imagine how much more you might love your spouse or coworkers if you stopped expecting perfection from them. He calls this realization a grace! Once you learn to seek Jesus alone, and realize that others aren’t the be-all and end-all, you will bypass the disappointment roadblock.
Two Reactions to Disappointment
I have found there are two reactions to disappointment when it makes its grand entrance into our world. The first response we have is to believe disappointment is the result of a lack of faith. This denies the fact that, in this life, disappointments are going to come. We can muster up all of the faith in the world and disappointment will still knock on our door from time to time. Our faith does not prevent disappointment; it carries us through the valley of grief that disappointment carves. The idea that disappointment is caused by a lack of faith misses the grace it really is. The writer of Ecclesiastes eloquently portrays this: “In the day of prosperity be joyful, but in the day of adversity consider: Surely God has appointed the one as well as the other” (Eccles. 7:14).
The second response when disappointment comes calling is fundamentally fatalistic. It’s the belief that disappointment is always lurking in the shadows, ready to hit the kill switch. So we think the best approach to life is to lower our expectations and faith. The motto for this way of thinking is found in this nugget from seventeenth-century poet Alexander Pope: “Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”
But why can’t there be a balance? Why can’t we just live in high hope, great faith, and expectation about our future and at the same time believe that, should disappointment come our way, it’s just an expected part of doing something new? Could this be the place where we meet God and understand Him for who He really is, not who we have created Him to be?
Yes, at this intersection of disappointment and expectation I bring my disappointments to God, trusting in Him to help me make sense of the chaos. If I don’t share my disappointments with God, I’m actually neglecting His desire to heal and transform me and get me moving again. Mike Coleman’s life expectations got hammered when the worldwide music industry was changed by technology. It was in that place, where his expectation suffered the wounds of disappointment, that he would eventually see his reflection in the face of God and find the deeper purpose of his painful journey.
Meeting God at the Intersection of Disappointment and Expectation
One of the great biblical examples of finding God at the intersection of disappointment and expectation is the story of John the Baptist. John had labored for years paving the way for Jesus’s ministry. He lived in the hot and arid desert, clothing himself in camel hair and existing on a diet of locusts dipped in wild honey. Not exactly a life of luxury for the man given two world-changing tasks: calling Israel to a baptism of repentance and preparing Israel to receive the Messiah.
When Jesus came on the scene, John declared, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). All of John’s messianic expectations were in Jesus. The hope of John, and all of Israel for that matter, was that the Messiah would usher in a glorious earthly kingdom, and for this reason, those years spent in the wilderness were meaningful and purposeful. John stepped down from the limelight of ministry to serve the greater purpose of Jesus establishing His kingdom. John must have felt an extreme sense of gratification and thankfulness seeing Jesus’s ministry expand and grow, knowing the kingdom of God was soon to burst upon the world scene in an epiphany of glorious light.
But disappointment set in when Jesus seemed to be doing more teaching, preaching, and healing than kingdom building. Something about Jesus’s message and mission didn’t sit well with John the Baptist. By now, he thought, Jesus should be doing something much more significant than opening blind eyes and preaching to the poor. Wresting political power from the Roman Empire would be a good start, but that didn’t seem to be on Jesus’s ministry agenda.
In the meantime, John was thrown into prison because he confronted King Herod for sleeping with the king’s sister-in-law. Rotting in a jail cell awaiting an uncertain fate, John began to doubt Jesus’s credibility. It’s a wonder that such disappointment could take root in a man like John, especially after witnessing the supernatural when he baptized Jesus in the Jordon River: “And the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven which said, ‘You are My beloved Son; in You I am well pleased’” (Luke 3:22).
This says to me that no one is immune from the temptation of disappointment. With his expectations in ruins, John confronted Jesus with an unthinkable question: “Now when John, while imprisoned, heard of the works of Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to Him, ‘Are You the Expected One, or shall we look for someone else?’” (Matt. 11:2–3 NASB).
What an amazing question. John is normally not held in high esteem for the audacity of his inquiry. Some may be persuaded to think, How dare he ask Jesus such a ridiculous question! Doesn’t he know who he’s talking to? This is the Lamb of God, announced by the Father’s voice from heaven and confirmed by the Holy Spirit resting on Him.
But I, for one, really appreciate John’s question, because it lets me know he knew something about the nature of Jesus I tend to forget. John knew he could be a broken human being in God’s presence and not receive forty lashes. He knew he could be real, vulnerable, and expressive, sharing his disappointments and brokenhearted questions without being rebuked or told to just suck it up. Maybe, more than a question, it was a plea for help and clarity coming from a friend wasting away in a gloomy dungeon. “Are you the Expected One or should we look for someone else?” I think John had the pressing intuition that Herod was going to kill him (which Herod later did) and so he wanted to have one last conversation with his friend Jesus. When I read this question, I realize John is meeting Jesus at the crossroads of expectation and disappointment. I think John in his human frailty and weakness needed an encouraging word from the Lord to not give up on his faith and hope in the messianic promise.
What’s so intriguing about this exchange between the Baptist and the Christ was not the question but the answer. Jesus didn’t rebuff John or speak harshly to him, thinking it an insult to be asked such a thing. Instead, Jesus lovingly replied to John’s disciples, “Go and tell John the things which you hear and see. The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me” (vv. 4–6).
What is so amazing about Jesus’s reply is that all of the things He listed about His ministry were Old Testament predictions of what the Messiah would one day accomplish. In listing these signs Jesus was saying, “John, I know I’ve blown your expectations but let Me give you a piece of information you may not have considered. You have assumed I would initially come as a conquering King, but according to Scripture, the Messiah will first come as a healer. John, I will fulfill all of the Scriptures concerning who I am but you’ll just have to be patient. In the meantime, friend, don’t allow the roadblocks of self-pity and disappointment to grow into resentment toward Me.” What a reassuring answer! What a friend! Right in the middle of the intersection of disappointment and expectation, John the Baptist brings his painful question to Jesus: “Are You the Expected One or should we look for someone else?” And instead of rejecting him, Jesus assures him that He is indeed the One he prepared the way for.
We Raise Ourselves toward God by the Questions We Ask Him
In the book Night, a vivid recollection about surviving the horrors of the Holocaust, author Elie Wiesel relates the dialogue he had with Moishe, a leader from a Jewish Orthodox house of prayer:
He had watched me one day as I prayed at dusk. “Why do you cry when you pray?” he asked, as though he knew me well. “I don’t know,” I answered, troubled. I had never asked myself that question. I cried because . . . because something inside me felt the need to cry. That was all I knew. “Why do you pray?” Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe? “I don’t know,” I told him, even more troubled and ill at ease. “I don’t know.” From that day on, I saw him often. He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer. . . . Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. . . . “And why do you pray, Moishe?” I asked him. “I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.”2
In the New Testament, people asked Jesus lots of questions and He answered all of them—except a handful asked by religious leaders attempting to trap Him by His words. This says to me Jesus isn’t offended by requests for clarity when disappointment comes and expectations are ruined. God longs to dialogue with us, especially in our despair.
When Mary the sister of Lazarus was in the midst of grief over her brother’s death, she approached Jesus and said, “If You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32). She was really saying, “Where were You when we needed You? You could have prevented this and You didn’t. Why?” And what was Jesus’s reaction? Was He angry or offended? Not even close. Jesus responded to Mary with one of the most tender questions in the Bible: “Where have you laid him?” (v. 34).
Jesus so loves you He is unwilling to allow you to go on living with buried dreams and hopes. He is constantly attempting to draw you back to the intersection where your expectations were crushed by disappointment and help you find meaning in the night season. In Jesus’s conversation with Mary’s sister Martha, He asked her if she believed He was the resurrection and the life. That’s the ultimate question for all of us, isn’t it? Do we believe Jesus can resurrect long-dead expectations and leave behind an empty tomb once filled with the grave clothes of disappointment? Ask Lazarus that question, because he left that tomb.
To Mary Magdalene, who was disappointed upon finding the tomb empty, believing someone had taken Jesus’s body away, He asked, “Woman, why are you weeping?” (20:15). To Peter, who was disappointed in himself for denying the Lord three times, Jesus asked, “Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me?” (21:16). With the question came an assignment that encouraged Peter to move past his disappointment: “Tend My sheep” (v. 16). Jesus was empathetic toward Peter in his brokenness and restored him to his place of ministry after a disappointing failure.
Then there were the two men on the road to Emmaus, their expectations crushed at the news of Jesus’s crucifixion because they “were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21). As they walked and talked along the road leading them out of Jerusalem, three days after Jesus’s death, a mysterious man joined them. The Scriptures say they were kept from recognizing that the man was Jesus, there at the crossroads of disappointment and expectation. The crucifixion battered and broke Jesus beyond recognition, and I believe He still bore those marks even after His resurrection. I wonder, too, if it wasn’t their own disappointment that made it impossible for them to see Him. Have you ever had that experience? The truth, a way out of your disappointment and self-pity, might be right in front of you, walking right next to you, and since you can’t even imagine that God is there offering you a way out, you simply can’t see Him. So these two tired, dusty Jewish travelers, their heads hanging low, tell the man walking with them about everything that’s happened, even how the women and the other disciples had gone to the tomb on two occasions and reported the same thing: the tomb was empty. But did that give them hope? No! They were so deep in the gutter of their disappointment they couldn’t even see over the curb.
Jesus said to them, after they tell their tale of woe, “Oh foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?” (vv. 25–26). This was a piece of information they had not considered.
When they reached the village where they were staying, they asked Jesus to join them for the evening. As they sat at the table, Jesus took bread and broke it and served it to them. Immediately their eyes were opened and Jesus disappeared from their sight. And then, the “Duh!” moment: “And they said to one another, ‘Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us?” (v. 32). When they finally looked up out of their grief and into the possibility that everything the prophets foretold might be true, they finally saw Jesus. It dissolved their disappointments and inspired fresh expectation. In joy they rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the eleven disciples. “And they told about the things that had happened on the road, and how He was known to them in the breaking of bread” (v. 35).
It’s in that same place that Jesus is known to us, in the breaking of the bread—those places where we are being pulled apart like a loaf of bread. Those places where everyone wants a piece of us and we’ve got nothing left to give. Jesus comes to us in those painful intersections where our expectations have been crushed by disappointment and is known to us in our most vulnerable moments of brokenness.
The Rest of Mike’s Story
As I’m writing these words, my friend Mike Coleman is preparing for a comeback. You could say the pain of disappointment he’s endured the last five years is the introduction to the next season of his life, where all the pages are still blank because the story hasn’t been written yet. And when he comes out he’s going to have one great story to tell of God’s faithfulness toward him in the furnace of affliction. In the meantime, Mike continues to embrace his present situation with a joy that’s void of overwhelming feelings of disappointment. That’s a testimony of God’s grace.
If you have been broken by disappointing circumstances, remember what Mike told me: “We are not defined by how we handle the expected events in our lives but by the unexpected.” If your expectations have been dashed on the rocks of disappointment, there’s a silver lining in the experience—even though the stitching part stings. As you embrace this time of unexpected disappointment you are being defined, sharpened, and shaped into the nature of the One who called you—Jesus. You may not see it now, but one day your scars of disappointment will define the bedrock of who you really are.
BOUNCE TAKEAWAY:
Reflect on Your Own Story
Do you have a disappointment you are struggling with and trying to find the reason behind? I encourage you to bring your disappointing heartaches to God. If you are at the crossroads where expectation has met a disappointing loss, please pray this prayer with me:
Father God, I bring to You today my disappointment (right here I want you to write down in your bounce journal exactly what your disappointment is, and then continue on in the prayer). I don’t know why this is happening and I’m struggling right now. I really desire to know not necessarily why this happened but what You want me to learn in the process. If there is something I’m missing—a piece of information that will give me Your divine perspective about this moment in my life—my ears and heart are open to hear Your still small voice.
Here is your challenge: dare to share your disappointments with God. Read Psalm 34 and Psalm 138:3, 8. Meditate on these passages of Scripture that describe King David’s confidence that God desires to dialogue with His children. After you have read the Word, begin to express your heartache to your heavenly Father. Now, take time to listen to God’s still small voice as He answers you. I am confident you will hear Him speak fresh wisdom and clarity into your spirit about the matters that concern you. As God begins to clarify things to you, I encourage you to write them down in this section of your bounce journal.