Great Expectations

There’s this thing called ‘expectations.’ It’s something that everyone has to one degree or another. We expect the sun to rise and set each day. We expect the flowers to bloom in spring. In fact, I think we live our lives expecting a lot of things to just happen. We expect food to be there when we are hungry. We expect friends to stand by us in times of need. We expect family to love us.

But many times our expectations are unmet. I’ve found that each time an expectation is unmet, there comes pain. After a while, we don’t expect good things anymore. Instead expectation becomes married with pain and produce cynicism. Suddenly it’s expected for friends to leave us when we need them the most. It’s expected that family may not care. It’s expected that people are inherently evil and that pain is the norm. There eventually comes that point where it hurts too much to have any positive expectations of anyone for fear that it will only hurt more.

I don’t have a lot of expectations these days…

And many times (perhaps too many times) I wonder what is expected of me. I fear too often that my actions will produce an unmet expectation in another. I fear that it will produce cynicism in them yet again; that my failure might enrich the poison already flowing through their veins. I’ve become very careful about the way I carry myself around those I care about.

I have a lot of expectations on myself…

And that is the problem I’ve stumbled upon in the past week. I have no expectations of others, but every kind of expectation on myself.

Such is no way to live, so now place a new trust in God to work such things out of me and replace it with a the great expectation that all truly seek: Hope

Current State of Spirit: Waiting. After a week of spiritual ups and downs, I'm aware that the only way things will truly grow to be better is if i sit instead of trying to run, trust instead of trying to do.