What do you expect?

Disappointment can steal our joy and rob us of hope. It can weaken our faith and stall or even stop our spiritual growth. It can even go so far as to cause us to turn away from a loving, caring and merciful God. There is a profitable way to deal with disappointment and I suspect that we often spend too much time on treating this consequence when what we really need is a cure to the problem. Rather than consider ways of dealing with the disappointment we often face in life, in this article I want to focus on the cause of disappointment and some preventative measures. Disappointment is the result of a failed expectation. We believe that something “should” or “shouldn’t” occur in life and act on that belief as if we knew the future. Often we can avoid this trap by simply applying scripture before developing our expectation. As believers we should expect to be hated and persecuted for what we say and do however, more often than not, we expect that others will always appreciate our efforts on their behalf. We expect that all who enter our life will leave feeling refreshed and encouraged only to be devastated when they turn a deaf ear and conclude we are ignorant. Our expectation should only be toward pleasing God and not the individual. We should be mindful of the law of sowing and reaping and judge our own actions, expecting them to be returned, but trust God as to when and where. I suspect that better still we should have no expectation at all outside of scripture, for there are more than enough blessings to expect and depend on found there. Perhaps we should replace all other expectations with hope and let that hope be sustained by our faith that, regardless of the uncertainties of life, almighty God is in control.