Greater Expectations

It was my mentor who got me to start thinking properly about expectations.

Previously things happened to me and I just went with the flow. I was the recipient and did not really impose anything. I went to university to a large degree because it was expected of me. I had done the A-levels to get to university because it was expected of me. I may have had dreams of my own, but I wasn’t too insistent in pursuing them. There was a path to be walked that education was supposed to provide in the country in which I lived. I follow that path, jump through the necessary hoops and meet those expectations of me. It didn’t bother me at the time, I just did what was expected.

It was my mentor who intervened in my third and final year at university. He was not part of my course and became a mentor just because of our church connections developed over the previous year. He helped me a lot at a significant crisis moment at the time where I had a lot of doubts and questions about purpose and meaning. His intervention was crucial as he reminded me of going to the source of my faith to discover that which I needed.

Sure enough, as I got out of myself and into God one of the first things that helped me was having expectations of God. Expectations of Him because of what He says about Himself in His word. Trusting Him, learning of Him, loving Him and serving Him helped a lot. Growing in practising the expectations of Him  and seeing Him exceed them time and again built confidence in Him. As long as I remained focused on Him.

From there it was tentatively working out expectations of myself. Working them out step by step and seeing where it worked and where those expectations were met and where they needed revising or scrapping. For a while I thought that the initial expectations were all I was supposed to work on. And with that thinking as the realisation came closer, so came a creeping sense of complacency. A sense in which what was expected was about to be realised and so there was little else that was needed.

That was disastrous.

What helped, then, was help to remember and rediscover that the life of faith was one in which growing was always supposed to be the underlying factor. So as the expectations got nearer to being realised, it was simply about setting greater expectations. Ones that would fit with that factor of growing. Never settling for what is and what has been achieved. Seeing in Christ, the high calling was always challenging me to move on.

In essence it is good to have expectations and ever be ready to set greater expectations.

(Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash)

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden