Trust vs. Expectations
Something I’ve been thinking about for years, that I’ve talked to people about a number of times: what is the boundary between healthy trust and unhealthy expectations? Too often in the past, I feel like I’ve set myself up for some sort of fall, but just tried to brush it aside as a price that comes with trust - it just comes with the territory.
Or does it? The majority of the hurt probably comes from expectations, fair or unfair, held on another person to provide. Proverbs 3:5 says to “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” If I’m trusting Him with all my heart, does that leave no room to trust others? Maybe. But I think God is saying more than the obvious fact that I should trust Him first. When Jesus says that the second command to love your neighbor is like the first (to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, body, and strength), there is a clear relationship between the two: the second flows naturally from the first, the beautiful harmony of vertical and horizontal relationships. Paul writes in 1 Cor. 13:7 that love always trusts, so clearly trust is an integral part of love. But how does that look different from expecting? If you’re placing trust, doesn’t that mean you’re placing expectations?
I really don’t know the answer to this and I’m still trying to navigate it, but maybe it looks something like this: according to one of my dear graduated sociology friends, the natural tendency for people is to trust new acquaintances (if I can recall correctly, said something along the lines of, “why would they lie? There is little perceived social advantage to lying, so the majority of people are honest and people believe them in return.” We trust what they say is true, but we don’t expect them to take care of us. If they do (and assuming we’ve cleared them of having any ulterior motive), it’s counted as a huge blessing and we’re thankful.
Maybe I should be viewing acts of love and kindness from friends and loved ones more as acts from acquaintances or strangers - not really expecting anything, ever, but being pleasantly surprised when they do. It doesn’t mean that I think they’re liars (and thus, I trust them), but just that I don’t anticipate my need for love to be fulfilled by them to any degree (holding expectations on them). We’d typically say such a view is sad and myopic, but that’s according to the world, which only sees all of us imperfect humans as the source of love. When we bring God into the picture, everything changes. Not holding expectations on others leaves me room to place all my trust and expectations on God, the only one who can truly provide.
Whoever deliberately tries to be sorry will never be sorry. Sorrow cannot be induced by human effort.
Desiring God
Worship is a way of gladly reflecting back to God the radiance of His worth. This is the ideal. For God surely is more glorified when we delight in His magnificence than when we are so unmoved by it that we scarcely feel anything and only wish we could. Yet He is also glorified by the spark of anticipated gladness that gives rise to the sorrow we feel when our hearts are lukewarm. Even in the miserable guilt we feel over our beastlike insensitivity, the glory of God shines. If God were not gloriously desirable, why would we feel sorrowful for not feasting fully on His beauty?
Desiring God - John Piper
There is much mental suffering in our world. But some of it is suffering for the wrong reason because it is born out of the false expectation that we are called to take each other’s loneliness away. When our loneliness drives us away from ourselves into the arms of our companions in life, we are, in fact, driving ourselves into excruciating relationships, tiring relationships and suffocating embraces. To wait for moments or places where no pain exists, no separation is felt and where all human restlessness has turned into inner peace is waiting for a dreamworld. No friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness. And by burdening others with these divine expectations, of which we ourselves are often only partially aware, we might inhibit the expression of free friendship and love and evoke instead feelings of inadequacy and weakness. Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of an anxious clinging to each other. They ask for gentle fearless space in which we can move to and from each other. As long as our loneliness brings us together with the hope that together we no longer will be alone, we castigate each other with our unfulfilled and unrealistic desires for oneness, inner tranquility and the uninterrupted experience of communion.
It is sad to see how sometimes people suffering from loneliness, often deepened by the lack of affection in their intimate family circle, search for a final solution for their pains and look at a new friend, a new lover or a new community with Messianic expectations. Although their mind knows about their self-deceit, their hearts keep saying, ‘Maybe this time I have found what I have knowingly or unknowingly been searching for.’ It is indeed amazing at first sight that men and women who have had such distressing relationships with their parents, brothers or sisters can throw themselves blindly into relationships with far-reaching consequences in the hope that from now on things will be totally different.
— Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life
(via schizophreniatic)
(Source: unutterablyalone)
Pray also for me, that whenever I speak, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.
Ephesians 6:19-20
SBSB…SBSB…SBSBUS! It’s the SBSBUS, the SBSB bus!
My sister
The most terrible poverty is loneliness, and the feeling of being unloved
Mother Teresa (via thelittlephilosopher)
(Source: chronicles-of-a-diseased-mind)
“Morning by morning new mercies I see”
what if seeing his new mercies begins with allowing him to lead us to places where we are at his mercy
A Night at the F4
Alex (playing Civ 4): I WIN!
Justin: Be quiet!
Alex: I WIN!
Chris: Don't touch me there!
Daniel & Me: What?!
Alex: ...I WIN!
Out of the depths I have cried to You, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice!
Let Your ears be attentive
To the voice of my supplications. If You, LORD, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with You,
That You may be feared. I wait for the LORD, my soul does wait,
And in His word do I hope. My soul waits for the Lord
More than the watchmen for the morning;
Indeed, more than the watchmen for the morning. O Israel, hope in the LORD;
For with the LORD there is lovingkindness,
And with Him is abundant redemption. And He will redeem Israel
From all his iniquities.
Psalm 130, NASB
