People will let you down. Expect it. Accept it. Show mercy. Move on.

When I was a very young man, just starting out in the dual pursuits of being a Christian and a husband, which are not necessarily the same things, one day a weird and curious message came to my mind. It was curious because it seemed to have nothing to do with anything I’d been thinking about or was experiencing.

I was in an uncommonly happy period. I’d found fulfillment, joy and a sense of hope in my burgeoning faith. I was practically a newlywed, happily married to a kind and beautiful girl who truly adored me.

But this message came to me, unbidden. It wasn’t audible; it didn’t need to be. It burned itself into my brain as if etched there with a laser. More than forty years later, I still remember it virtually word for word. It was so powerful I thought it might be a message from God. Today, looking back, I’m sure it was.

“People are going to let you down,” it said. “Everybody is going to let you down. Your friends will let you down. Christians will let you down. Your parents will let you down. Even your wife will let you down. But when this happens, look to me, for I will never let you down.”

I recall being greatly puzzled. Until then, hardly anybody had ever disappointed me in any serious way. Perhaps I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the human race generally—I’d never thought about that. But I had absolute faith in the people closest to me: my fellow churchgoers, for instance, my mom and dad, and above anyone, my bride.

Over the ensuing decades, though, that message has come back to me times without number. Because it turned out to be so hauntingly accurate, accurate beyond my poor ability to reckon with it at the time.

The only part of it I’d question now is the very last part. In my observation, God also lets us down, or at least we think he does.

Anyway, the message came as a warning, I think, a spiritual word to wise me up: This is how life really is, that voice was saying. Get ready for it. Pain is coming. It’s inevitable.

Woven into the fabric of the universe is the tragic fact that humans are flawed and fallen creatures. We’re selfish and narcissistic. We’re muddled in our understanding of ourselves, others and the Lord. Even when we want very much to do right, we frequently end up doing wrong. Too often, we’re ignorant of the havoc we create.

We love our kids so much we’d die for them, yet end up warping them into mirrors of our own neuroses, pettiness and prejudices. If we can’t even get it right with our kids, God help everybody else who deals with us.

So, then, it’s a foundational truth that people are going to disappoint you. And the closer you are to them, the greater your pain will be when they do.

They’re going to overlook your deepest needs. Or they’re going to lie to you. Or they’re going to cheat you. Or they’re going to abandon you in favor of some addiction. Or they’re going to do any other of a million things that can crush your soul.

Worse, because you’re as human as they are, you’ll somehow, somewhere along the line, in some way, crush someone’s heart, too. You may pray to heaven to keep you from doing harm, but you’re going to do it. You may not mean to, you may not even realize you did it. Yet you will do it.

One solution, of course, is to simply run away. You can become either so fragile or so bitter that you shrink from human contact. After all, if you’ll only be wounded to the extent that you love and are loved, the answer might be to avoid both.

But that leads to spiritual miserliness, to a gnawing, caustic loneliness. It becomes a living, solitary death.

Better, I believe, is to recognize we’re all caught in an unavoidable web of hurting others and being hurt, often without malice aforethought. We can’t read each other’s minds. We’re each absorbed in our own problems. We don’t know what others need and they don’t know what we need, and even if we did know, we wouldn’t be capable of meeting all those insatiable longings.

That being so, we can choose to simply grant grace to those who’ve disappointed us. We can recognize that we’re every whit as flawed as they are, and that we no-doubt have hurt them as well. We can remember that everybody is suffering and (nearly) everybody is just doing the best he knows how to navigate this messed up world. We can give everybody—and ourselves—the benefit of the doubt.

We can reach out, even through our pain, and offer forgiveness, and mercy, and love.

Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.