Jordan Adlard-Rogers' life seems more like fiction than reality. Jordan was raised in public housing by a single mother in Porthleven, England. He spent his early adulthood as a struggling care worker, barely making enough to get by. However, all of that changed earlier this year when the British aristocrat Charles Rogers died, leaving behind $60 million, the 1,536-acre Penrose Estate, and the $1,300 a week Penrose Trust without a known heir. A DNA test carried out on the 62-year-old Charles Rogers uncovered that Jordan was his natural son and therefore the heir to his estate.
We all know the story that follows. Overnight, Jordan went from a struggling care worker to the lord-of-the-manor of Penrose. While we may think of this as a feel-good rag to riches story, it wasn’t that for Jordan.
He always thought that Charles may have been his father, but Charles pushed him away whenever he tried to make contact. Charles struggled with a lifelong drug addiction and passed away from a drug overdose in his car outside of the Estate. Jordan said, “People say I’m lucky, but I would trade anything to be able to go back and for Charles to know I was his son... Maybe then he might have taken a different path.”
Often disappointment doesn’t show itself in the most obvious ways, but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. Even though I doubt any of us will face a similar situation to what Jordan encountered, we can often find ourselves disappointed with outcomes that others may not see has bad. Maybe you had a surgery that you thought would give you full mobility back, but instead you only improved 50%; or you could have sold your house for a good price, but still under what you hoped for. Situations like this make disappointment hard, because unlike other emotions like sadness or even guilt, it can be hard to find someone to help you process the emotions. Yet, we have someone who can hear us and understand our pain when no one else can. Even if the whole world turned against us, God would still be for us. No matter how small others may feel our problems are, we can always turn to the love of God.