I’ve never done well with expectations.
When I was sixteen, I was expected to qualify for the state track meet, but I choked and I didn’t even make it past our high school’s league finals.
As a young mom, I expected myself to handle the complex world of motherhood like an old pro, but barely made it through many days with my sanity in place.
And now, as a pastor’s wife, there are lots of expectations coming at me from all over the place, and I must shoulder them well, serve God and our church and our family as best as I can. It can be a bit daunting.
I often remind myself that God has only one core expectation of me, and it is this:
God expects me to need Him. I will need his grace. I will need his mercy. I will need his power, his love, his presence, his forgiveness.
While that sounds lovely, I must also take a long look in the mirror and challenge my own expectations of others. It is easy to forget that the grace that rolls through my own soul so smoothly seems to bottle up when I have expectations of those around me.
Like when I expect friends to understand me when I rarely understand myself.
Or when I expect my husband to pursue me when I wall myself off.
There are also moments that I expect that my children to love what is good and true without first being able to acknowledge their own wrongful hearts.
Or, perhaps the ugly expectation I sometimes have of God to explain himself to me while I refuse to acknowledge what He has already told me.
Mainly, there is the following:
That He is always with me.
That He lived and died to set me free.
That His grace is enough.
That have I died to myself, and now my life is His to live for His glory.
My goodness, when I pledged my heart to him what exactly did I expect?
Did I expect holiness to be easily attained?
No, no. This world, so full of sorrow and joy intermingled, is not easy for anyone.
The difference between the believing Christian and the person who finds faith futile is the promise of hope.
The gospel gives us hope that this life we are living is more than just a string of experiences, it is greater than a simple trail of expectations that are either met or trampled beneath life’s circumstances.
In fact, God’s expectation that I will need Him is the one truth that can set me free from all other expectations, both my own and those of others.
For if we fail He takes our failure and redeems it. If we succeed He takes that and uses it to point to Himself. He grows beauty from pain, joy dances through sorrow, life triumphs over death.
All of this upside down genius of God allows the beautiful reality that it is all about Him and not really about us to shine. Then it exposes the expectations put on our human ability and goodness for what they really are: missing the mark.
I am ending this year with new, simpler expectations. I expect my heart to need God’s love. I expect my days to need His presence. I expect my words to need His truth, my soul His hope, and my life His saving grace.
And I plan to revel in His greatness in 2013, because, after all we can always expect that.
