“Expectations should be dressed in joy and transformational power, not pain and death.” – Adela Olteanu
The topic of expectations is extensive and could easily warrant a whole book of its own. So, I am going to explore just one of the foundational pillars on which the whole structure of our expectations is built.
Who are we expecting?
Mankind has an innate need to follow the thread of our life experiences back to the source. We need someone or something to “blame”, so to speak. Whether the accompanying emotion is positive or negative is secondary. The source we associate it with is key – our upbringing, our culture, our parents, ourselves, the universe, fate, karma, the gods … or THE God and His ancient enemy, the devil. This duality is, after all, what it all boils down to. Even if your worldview is the absence of God and therefore, dependence on yourself, it is fundamentally a statement that condemns a God that left you at the mercy of the darkness.
Our expectations flow from our beliefs, which are built on our life experiences and how we processed them. Who do you expect to see? God or the devil?
I recently had a massive reframing of my expectations in the area of finances. Because of some mistakes I made in the past, I was hypersensitive about having enough money, and I put the burden almost entirely on myself to make sure I didn’t end up in a bad place again. That was coupled with exposure to countless stories and real-life involvement in situations where God’s work was done in the context of huge lack. One never knew if and when God would “come through”, so my expectations were very low. Sure, in theory, He had all the world’s money at His disposal, but where was it, then? I wouldn’t have said this out loud, but I considered myself more reliable than He was. God apparently decided this situation needed to change (my eternal gratitude for His mercy), and in the last year, He brought a significant amount of financial ambiguity into my world. I had to face what I believed. It wasn’t pretty.
What is so magnificent about His process is that He didn’t choose Option A – you will always be comfortable, or Option B – you will suffer, so suck it up – but Option C … one I hadn’t even considered. First, He made it clear beyond any possible doubt that He CAN provide; by giving me a gift that blew my concept of generosity completely out of the water. Ok, God is quite capable. But He didn’t make any promises regarding the future. HIS reframing was that in both the fat and the lean seasons, it is not about His provision, but His PURPOSE. He took the discussion into a completely different realm.
He framed my expectations around looking for His purpose in each season. His new flavor of grace, His bigger picture of Kingdom work in and through my life. I can’t promise that I will embrace the lean seasons with perfect grace at all times, but I CAN say that I will go into them with a sense of curiosity and anticipation for what God is up to. That is worlds apart from where I was, and absolutely colors what I will gain from those experiences.
I am expecting joy and transformational power, not pain and death.
God may not be moving where we expect Him to. There may be areas where we desperately want to see Him intervene and it seems like there are only crickets. This unevenness of His visibility can cause us to extrapolate those unmet expectations into other areas of our lives.
What would happen if we stopped and asked Him to reframe our expectations instead? What if we released God from our social contracts and invited Him to mold our expectations around the expression of His heart?
The magnificence of expectation as an onramp to awe is that it gives God a platform to take us further than we imagined we could go. In truth, even our wildest positive expectations are a pittance compared to what God can and wants to do. We are far more often guilty of settling for too little than we are of expecting too much. But God doesn’t always behave the way we think He should. It reminds me of the line from the movie The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. When speaking of Aslan: “He is not a tame lion, but he is good.”
Who do you look for? Who do you expect to see? God or the devil?
If we are expecting to see God, even if it means stretching our worldview to its breaking point, we will most certainly experience awe. We will step outside of what we can comprehend. The transcendent. The God Who is too big to understand. Our lives can be transformed.
Can you expect joy and transformational power, not pain and death?
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