062: Expectations

April 18, 2010
1 Corinthians 4&5

I had coffee with my friend Mollee today before church. She said something that was quite profound to me – she said: “There’s a fine line between expectations and grace.” I think that’s true.

As we were discussing, there are pros and cons to expectations. I think the benefits of expectations is the fact that when you have expectations of someone, you are invested in their life. If you don’t care about them, you have no expectations! But if you do care, then usually you want to see them become something better than what they currently are or do something different than what they currently do. In essence, you are creating a possibility for them in your head, a vision of sorts, and you want to see them attain that.

Unfortunately, people don’t always live up to our expectations of them, regardless of how invested in them we are, and then when they don’t meet our goals for them, we risk being disappointed.

As Mollee pointed out, though, perhaps rather than being disappointed, we should also consider the option of grace. Grace would be when a friend does something that I don’t think they should have done, but realizing that they are human and will fall short of my idealistic outlook on their life, so allowing them to be who they are, mistakes and all.

But there is also a place for disappointment. If people you see great potential in continue to disappoint you, maybe it’s not fair to them to keep extending grace, because often times (unfortunately!) grace makes us lazy. We know that we don’t HAVE to meet the expectations, so we don’t strive for it.

I think the challenge comes in how we handle expectations, disappointment, and grace – especially in communicating those things to each other. For example, do I have a right to be disappointed when I have expectations of someone that I have not clearly communicated? I’m not sure I do. Perhaps it’s not a bad idea for me to communicate that I AM disappointed, and explain that my expectations of them weren’t met, but then immediately show and express the fact that I realize it wasn’t fair of me, and I want to be gracious to them and ask them to be gracious to me.

But then again, I DO want to hold people to expectations, because I feel like sometimes we need to have people believe in us and hold us to higher standards. When we have failed and failed so many times that we’ve stopped believing in ourselves, it’s helpful to have someone who can come along side you and encourage you and convince you that you are capable and, in fact, should attain the potential you have.

But who do we do this to? And under what circumstances? And how closely do we carry it out and keep people accountable? I’m not sure…