Expectations vs. Expectancy

Over the past 5 years of my life I have been on a journey of learning how to not live in disappointment. During these past 5 years I have been learning how to obey God quickly, cheerfully, and completely. Because I have been learning how to do this and the fact that I am a dreamer I often slammed into disappointment. For a good bit of this journey I had a really hard time reconciling the promises of God for my life with what I was actually experiencing.

During these years I have consistently had people tell me that my faith inspired them. This was encouraging but also confusing because the risks I was taking were not turning out like I had anticipated. While I was thankful that my life and choices were causing others to obey Jesus in new ways it often left me with more questions than answers.

Part of the problem was that I had a wrong understanding of what faith is. Hebrews 11:1 says, “Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.” I was getting hung up on the words “will actually happen” and not the “confidence” piece. This is where expectations vs. expectancy comes into the equation.

What I have learned through this process of risking and “failing” is that I was living with expectations not expectancy. I know those might sound like the same but they are actually quite different.

Living with expectancy means that we are confident that God will do what he promised. But living with expectations means that we are requiring it to look a certain way. Do you really think that Moses expected to roam the desert for 40 years with a bunch of whining people? I have no doubt he had his own journey with disappointment but in the end he was confident that God’s promise would be fulfilled even if it looked different than the way he had always envisioned it.

What is something God has promised you? Have you placed an expectation upon God that it has to happen in a certain way and in a certain timing for it to be a fulfilled promise? Letting go of your expectations do not mean that you are losing faith but actually quite the opposite. When we relinquish our right to have expectations and we live with an expectant heart it thrusts us into greater relationship with Jesus. Each day we live with the thoughts that today God is going to move and do something that blows us away. We become aware of the ways God is moving in our lives and we stop focusing on the ways he is not moving like we expect him to. We see that he is more beautiful and more generous than we could have ever imagined. We see that the process of the promise is just as important as the promise.