I suppose that the question of expectations has been the one at the heart of my thinking for a while. I've been avoiding it for this very reason. If I can't answer this, I'm still stuck.
What should we expect? This is the realm of the cheesy pseudo-deep non-answer; "the unknown", "the unexpected", "the improbable", "the impossible". But the question deserves better. As much as life shapes our expectations and our experience of the world, we are powerful and meaningful beings; our expectations shape it back, and all along we shape ourselves. So it is fundamental.
And as much as what is, is - what we allow ourself to see is governed by our filters of expectation. What is possible may be limited, but our expectations limit us further, and there's a risk (and a prevailing reality) that we make the possible impossible by refusing it.
So what should we expect? What can we allow ourselves to expect? What dare we expect? Great and marvellous things happen, so do disasters. It seems that we can't expect something into being, but surely expectations cannot only function to be limiting; able to close doors but never open them?
I think it comes to a question of normality. Expectations need a frame of reference- are we aiming high or low? What do we have a right to expect? Maybe this is crucial.
But maybe we're getting the whole idea of expectation wrong in the first place.
After all, every expectation lives in a world view. We expect things; stuff, or events. Our expectations are structured from material conditions that can be satisfied or disappointed in fixed moments or periods of time. But, as we know all too well, these things are always riddled with unknowns and doubts. Yet God is against fear, and the most crippling fear is born of doubt. It seems that God expects confidence, but in what?
How should we handle our expectations? Not in events or objects, achievements or possessions it would seem. God doesn't seem to have a consistent policy in dishing out lifestyle outcomes, yet He insists that we can all expect His presence in our life experience.
Maybe we shouldn't be expecting things, but processes.
Actions and events have consequences. In the particular outworking of events or stories we cannot be sure, but God seems to be fixed on consequences. What we do matters. Our actions, decisions and relationships reverberate through lives and generations. This is the realm of deep causality, ruled by process, not event. And we understand it, this is the domain of the story, the growing seed, cycles of death and life and continuities of reality. In the end, we can't plan the future, but as humans, we can plant it.
Seeds sown will germinate, God has set the conditions for growth. And here, in the realm of process, we start to see some prevailing certainty. Good fruit proceeds from good trees, and vice versa, but with a bias. The universe, says God, is a weighted die. The ripples of the good outlast the ripples of the bad. There is a prevailing wind.. We live in a time of paradox, two worlds share the same substrate, a war is won but the battles go on. We are in the chase scene just before the end, and you just can't tell who's winning.
But back to the expectations of process. How do we set our expectation? I suppose, we look a little deeper for the ripples.. We expect a cause, and expect a purpose. Expect that someone's behind something, that if it feels significant, it is.
And here's where we get our power back. We cannot command our world, but we can shape it, a speaker I heard recently said it well, cultivation instead of domination.
To live out the story of nurturing people and the world like it will yield a harvest to us, to our will, is a model of love, of life, and, I think, our expectations. We cannot control, nor predict what will come, but this we can expect; that our response will affect it. We live for the long game, we trust in the bigger process.
In the space of a moment, everything is a discernible object. If you could press pause on the world, and observe it over an infinitely short moment, even a candle flame would look like a fixed, inanimate object. Yet not one atom, nor one Joule stays the same in a burning flame, it is a process, like the waves on the sea. Look over a longer period and you can see it; nothing stays the same, and "objects" are simply the momentary state of the substrate through which the processes ripple and flow. Over millennia, even forests are botanic oceans, a continuous process of growth, death and regrowth. No single cell remains, but a forest of pine will be a forest of pine, and oak, oak. In the end, over all of time, it all comes down to process.
To live in this reality, and have the expectations of process, changes our view of the present. Of course the state of the moment matters, but what we trust in is not what it will look like, but how it will get there. Here, God really gets His hands dirty; watch how Jesus tackles the process, the chain, and then the condition. God breaks the constraints of the ripples of our past then declares freedom. Where He less often changes objects, He extravagantly breaks and makes connections and consequences left, right and centre. God, it seems, is the Maestro of the process. In these matters, deep truths of story and humanity are our instruments, God is the architect and the world is our garden once again.
