I want you to ponder “expectations.”
We all grew up with them. Our parents expected us to be good children, clean our room, eat our veggies, do well in school and always leave home with clean underwear. Our parents told us we needed clean underwear in case we were in a car accident, in which case they would not be clean.
Teachers, coaches, professors, bosses, and spouses all placed a series of expectations on us which we have met, exceeded, or failed to achieve. We are living with those consequences, good or bad.
Careers carry expectations. In my line of work, I have discovered churches have expectations for their pastors. Congregations want us to be twenty years old with forty years’ experience. They want us out visiting all the time but available all day in the church office. We need to be able to sing, play an instrument, fix the plumbing, hang light fixtures, decipher computer code, and translate from the Greek. Our sermons should be serious while still being humorous. You get the picture.
We all live with expectations.
At one grocery store they are selling firewood bundles for a dollar! Seems that someone from corporate was expecting a brutal winter and ordered lots of firewood for their stores, and now they have an abundance of firewood. If you want to stock up for next year, I suggest you buy some of that dollar wood. It will be well aged by next fall.
I looked at that pile and wondered who got chewed out for ordering that much wood? What a bone-head order, did they take last year and double it? How did it happen, what were they expecting? Or perhaps there is another way to look at all that firewood.
Expectations are often misplaced and misguided. The news media has made tons of money reporting on “expectations.” The evening news can’t go broadcast without using the word, “expectation” in the newscast. Which means they are not reporting news, they are speculating on the future. The stock market is driven by whether a company meets “expectations” not what the actual corporate numbers are, listen to a stock report and see what I mean. Marriages are made or broken on expectations as much as on real behavior. We all have them, use them, and have been victimized by them.
While we don’t control events, we have control over our expectations. When we add grace to the mixture, we are adding God to the equation, and He does change things. In our personal relationships, in our church life, even in our corporate lives, maybe we should give our expectations to the Lord and allow his grace to transform them.
