Great Expectations? Or Greater Disappointments?

Expectations are a frightening companion to the events of life. Without them, experience is more like an intake of breath in a musty attic, leaving your life void of enough oxygen to make the action worthwhile. With them, it is like playing a bad game show of guessing what's behind door number three. The odds of it being a sports car is unlikely and you're not sure if the thrill of the chance is worth the disappointment of it being a quilted tea cozy. A gamble of the dice.

There's a pool of thought that without the pain of life, the sweetness would not be as delicious. It is hard to agree when you are in the midst of an unknown amount of distasteful. The theory to have loved and lost as a positive moment in your life has likely made you want to shun every optimist you've encountered, or worse. And knowing that your expectations could send you there even more violently is sometimes hard to deal with.

Dreams are often synonymous with expectations. The world is filled with slogans of how you should dare to dream, follow your heart, listen to the greater calling on your life. But what if that Dream ends up being a sports car in your head, and a tea cozy in reality? Where are your limitations, and when does reality and a mature perspective come into play?

Today a discussion developed in my kitchen over breakfast about how it is easier to hear God say no than it is to hear Him say yes. But often we wait, paralyzed by our fear of failed expectations, to hear that very quiet, often non-existent affirmative that our actions are lining up with the bigger picture.

Yet how terrifying is that first step? You haven't even lifted the second foot and you are earnestly listening for God to scream the cease and desist command. As if He didn't know that that first step was coming prior to your muscles engaging. At times that step is as far as you'll go, but there is a purpose in that one step. Even if it feels like wasted time and effort as a door slams in your face.

I have often lived in fear of having too lofty of expectations. And when it seemed like my dreams were some terrible prank, nothing but a light show, I have given up. However, I am beginning to see that sometimes those dreams are like the conjunctions in a sentence, bridging the gap from one thought that I have towards another that is on its way to realization. At times God will use my idea, my dream, to connect me to the bigger picture that I have been fearing that I'm missing. It is the waterway in which He directs my seemingly aimless ship.