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Blaine Smith of Nehemiah Notes writes in a recent article about the principal of inspirational dissatisfaction. Inspirational dissatisfaction is when your frustration with a situation serves as the impetus for you to make a positive change to your life.

Smith offers an example from his own life of how inspirational dissatisfaction lead him to a revelation about his own life. He worked as a pastor for a few years in the 70s, and while he liked some parts of the job, he was dissatisfied with the requirement of pastors to dabble in so many different skills. He found that he would much rather focus on improving a few skills, and that lead him to become a “resource pastor,” a role in which he feels much more satisfaction. However, without having had that dissatisfying experience, he would have never had that insight into his personality.

The following is a brief excerpt from “Welcome Guidance from Unwelcome Circumstances” that describes how God uses inspirational dissatisfaction to teach us and guide us:

Inspirational dissatisfaction … is the positive role that our experiences of frustration play—both in helping us understand important steps we should take with our life, and in finding the motivation to take them. We may be unhappy in our job, for instance, because the work doesn’t fit us well, or because coworkers are not supportive or have unreasonable expectations of us. Frustration can be our ally in such cases—a red-alert that we need to seek a change.

I love this concept, as simple as it is, for it provides us a basis for seeing a silver lining in adverse circumstances, which we can easily miss. Some Christians view all frustrating situations fatalistically and hopelessly. They assume that God is punishing them through these circumstances and that they shouldn’t strive to change them.

On a more healthy level, we may recognize how such situations help us grow, but we assume the silver lining comes only if we stay in them and allow God to stretch us there. That conclusion is often justified, and we can be too quick to run away from challenges, to say the least. Yet Scripture gives about equal weight to the other possibility—that God may use our frustration in such cases to enlighten us to the fact that we’re not where we should be. Healthy thinking requires that we give fair consideration to both possibilities, and feel permission to think in both directions.

Unfortunately, our Christian teaching usually gives far more attention to the former possibility than the latter. We also have elaborate vocabulary for talking about the one (“pick up your cross,” “accept your lot,” “be a living sacrifice,” “lose your life in order to find it”), and little in the way of convenient language to speak of the possibility that an unwelcome situation simply isn’t right for us.

“Inspirational dissatisfaction” fills this gap wonderfully well and can make a redemptive contribution to our Christian vocabulary. We shouldn’t underestimate the role that language plays in our ability to reason effectively and make sound decisions, given the extraordinary level of “self-talk” that we engage in constantly. I agonized over the question of whether to leave conventional church work for a specialized ministry far more than I should have, due especially to guilt-ridden self-talk. Simply knowing it was permissible to think in terms of inspirational dissatisfaction, and having that term available, would have made a big difference.

Read the rest of the article at nehemiahministires.com.

Are you currently in frustrating or dissatisfying situation? What do you think God might be trying to tell you through that situation? Have you ever experienced inspirational dissatisfaction?

One of the most popular resources in the Gospel.com community has always been its collection of devotionals.

The list of devotionals published by community members includes Our Daily Bread, Meet with God, the Lifetime Guarantee Daily Devotional, and many, many others. Starting today, we’re going to post an excerpt from one of these many different devotionals on the blog each morning.

Today’s devotional is from Daily Encounter, a weekday devotional written by Richard Innes of ACTS International:

As is commonly known, one of the biggest killers of ideas is the excuse, “We’ve never done it that way before.” 


However, profound ideas can come from the strangest places. Creative genius comes to people who are open to new ideas and different ways of doing things. For example, in 1964 the freighter Al Kuwait which was carrying 6,000 live sheep capsized and sank in Kuwait’s harbor. The sunken ship with its decomposing cargo began to present a serious threat to the country’s water supply through its desalination processing plant.

To overcome the problem the ship had to be raised and moved to a safe place without falling apart and dumping its poisonous contents into the nation’s water supply.

Karl Kroyer, a Danish engineer working in Kuwait, came up with a novel idea. He pumped 27 million ping-pong balls into the freighter’s hull which slowly raised it to the surface.

And where did he get this idea? From a Donald Duck comic book. Somebody sank Donald’s boat and he and his feathered friends raised it by filling it with ping-pong balls!

When it comes to creative living, a better place to get great ideas is in the words and examples of Jesus in the Bible. It pays to know it and hide its truths in our heart. One’s life is greatly enriched when it is lived in harmony with God’s Will and Word.

Read the complete devotional at ACTS International, or browse the Daily Encounter archives for many years’ worth of past devotionals.