What Did You Expect?

Imagine you wanting your baby to understand your every word, the meaning in the words you speak to him. Expecting him to pick up after himself and well basically take care of himself. Expectations? There’s just no chance for an infant to understand an adult. These thoughts came to me in thinking about how we tend to believe (make believe) that we completely understand God and His Word, His ways. Or more so our expectations are that He is in agreement with us. There’s not a person we know (or will ever know) that has lived up to our expectations and along the way we have put God in that same box of “Meet my Expectations”

     As the saying goes “God made man in His image and we returned the favor”. Most of us have our own top 10 list of sins and most of the time of course we won’t find our sins on that list. We read that His ways are much higher than our ways. This can lead us to momentary change but just different (perhaps greater) expectations. And that’s just it sometimes we just can’t (and wont) understand what is being said in His Word. Let humility pour into our lives and admit we don’t understand it or “accept” that we wouldn’t do it that way but then again we’re not God.

So in knowing that His grace, mercy, wisdom, thoughts, justice, order, love( and so forth) are greater than all I could ever imagine to offer Him the only thing to do is to surrender. Sure we will wrestle and struggle (to say the least) with things in His Word or with things that take place in our life. But through it all He is and will always be God. 

And I believe for most of us our expectations are so distorted, cloudy at best in what we expect out of others and most of all God. I heard a preacher some time ago close his message by asking, “What did you expect?” That question has come back to me throughout the years. To be brutally honest, I wish there was no hell, there was no cancer, for that matter that I hadn’t even experience my health issues these past few years. I wish (and then some) Adam and Eve did obey or that God didn’t throw a curse down on the entire world and mankind. But with that came Christ and His life and death on our behalf which doesn’t make sense to me. Indeed it may be the one thing that makes the least sense to me in the Bible. When somebody gives me a gift I didn’t expect it means more to me because for one I didn’t expect it but second and most importantly I realize it’s a gift and not only didn’t I expect but I didn’t deserve it. And so it is with God despite Him seemingly not living up to my expectations it’s me who has not (and will not) live up to His word. But He knew such and has made an offer for us that in the end will be way beyond our imagination and expectations. Still very few things in life are easy or live up to the expectations but here’s a suggestion from Pete Wilson (No Plan B), “Instead of griping that God isn’t living up to your expectations, that he isn’t meeting your needs the way you think they should be met, that he isn’t answering your prayers with a vending machine whoosh, you can make the choice to receive what Hes offering you in this moment. The comfort of realizing he knows what you’re going through. The hope of realizing he really does know what he’s doing.” In life we can expect the unexpected but in that always take time, in the good and the bad to see it as an opportunity of invitation. To invite God into that very moment.