What Did You Expect?

Psalms 62:5 My soul, wait in silence for God only; for my expectation is from Him.

Expectations of others can cause a lot of grief. If our expectations are not met, we tend to feel let down, disappointed, angry and/or offended. Sometimes the friend, co-worker, or family member does not even know they have failed to meet the mark we set for them, so we alone wallow in the angst of our own making. We play out a scenario in our heads of how a conversation might go, reading from the script of expectation. We might even rehearse both parts….if he says this, then I’ll say that…and we run an entire conversational video in our heads of a conversation that hasn’t even happened, working up emotions to go along with it so we are ‘prepared’. Sad thing is, we are responding to all these emotions we created with our own expectation.

People and situations are going to let us down; it is a fact of life. We can write those ‘scripts’ all day long but the reality is we are the only one that can read them. We are setting ourselves up for the fall we will blame on someone else for not meeting our expectations. It never ceases to amaze me, the way the devil uses our offenses and our "offendedness" to divide and conquer marriages, relationships, churches — even entire nations!

Many of us are not careful enough about the things we say and more importantly, we get offended far too easily. If it is a friend, a family member or a brother or sister in the church offends us with a little swat of his words or actions, we are undone. We expect more from them. What hypocrisy! We become angry and we want to defend ourselves, fight back or leave forever.

Jesus said that even if someone despitefully uses us, that means on purpose, that we are to respond in love. We, as human beings, are troubled and sinful. We are not perfect and we should never expect others to be, no matter what their positions are in the church. God is perfect and He is the one from whom our expectations should come — no man.

We are all guilty of this one way or another. Let's give our expectations and offenses to the Lord. Allow Him wash over us today. Allow Him Heal us. Get us back to where we need to be.