Reframing Our Expectations

Goodbye, October… Hello, November. (Where has the year gone?!)

I’m savoring these crisp and clear autumn days while they last—the climax of nature’s most colorful pageant. My favorite season indeed.

But it’s a melancholy season too. A time of reflection:

Every autumn, I find my thoughts curling inward, like the fading edges of fallen leaves, as another year descends to a close.

I can’t help but think about unfinished plans for the year, all that I foolishly hoped I’d accomplish and all that I haven’t yet done… Expectations can be tricky things, part good part bad, and we seem to spend most of our lives navigating that fine line between chasing expectations (what we want, what we think should happen) and embracing what IS.

When we tally up our highs and lows for the year, it’s easier to remember our disappointments and losses, isn’t it? (Even for happy occasions, we can remember what didn’t go according to plan.) Perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong things. What if our expectations, our perfect plans, prevent us from seeing joy and beauty in the ordinary and the unexpected?

“A writer for The Washington Post conducted an experiment to test people’s perception. He asked a famous violinist to perform incognito at a train station in the nation’s capital one January morning. Thousands of people walked by as he played, but only a few stopped to listen. After 45 minutes, just $32 had been dropped into the virtuoso’s open violin case. Two days earlier, this man—Joshua Bell—had used the same $3.5 million Stradivarius for a sold-out concert where people paid $100 a seat to hear him perform.

The idea of a person not being recognized for his greatness isn’t new. It happened to Jesus. ‘He was in the world,’ John said, ‘. . . and the world did not know Him’ (John 1:10). Why did people who had been expecting the Messiah give Jesus such a cold reception? One reason is that they were surprised. Just as people today don’t expect famous musicians to play in railway stations, the people in Jesus’ day didn’t expect Messiah to be born in a stable. They also expected Him to be a political king—not the head of a spiritual kingdom.” — C.P. Hia (Our Daily Bread, 10/31/11)

How often do we miss the work that God is doing in our lives because it doesn’t “look” the way we expect it to?

What if, instead of regretting losses and disappointments, I give thanks for where I am right now and celebrate the small gifts of grace I’m given each day?

After all: “It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” — Brother David Steindl-Rast

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Is there a time of year that makes you more reflective? What expectations are you wrestling with this fall? How do you practice gratitude? I’d love to hear what you think.

{ Image credit: Bert Kaufmann via CC by 2.0 license }