Expectations
Listen: “Under Pressure” by Queen
How do we live life without expectations? Is it even possible or healthy? Are some expectations destructive to our spiritual health? I have been active in the recovery community for over three years, and I have run across some cautionary statements concerning expectations:
Expectations are premeditated resentments. (Uncertain origin)
Expectations are resentments waiting to happen. (Anne Lamott)
Perhaps the best thing of all for me to remember is that my serenity is inversely proportional to my expectations. The higher my expectations of Max [spouse of writer] and other people are, the lower is my serenity. I can watch my serenity level rise when I discard my expectations. (Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 420)
When I was pastoring a growing church, I was amazed at how unrealistic people’s expectations in me could be. I remember one occasion when a couple was having a marital dispute and they called me on a Friday night and wanted me to come over to their house and have a counseling session (the church was only averaging about 200 in attendance at the time). I was going on a date with my wife, and I told them I would schedule an appointment with them after the weekend. They were offended that I wasn’t instantly available for them and left the church. I remember another instance when someone left the church because I didn’t smile at them and talk to them in the church foyer before a service started. When the church was averaging several thousand people in attendance, I would greet people in the foyer for fifteen minutes before each of our multiple weekend services. I guess I didn’t get around to everyone.
After several years of pastoring people and their expectations, I often thought: “I wish people would walk in the church doors with a big sandwich board sign on themselves. They could list out all their expectations on the sign before we even got to know each other. Then I could honestly let them know whether or not I would even try to meet their expectations.” For example, I could have told the couple on the front end that I would not be available for instantaneous Friday night marriage counseling appointments. That would have saved me the heartache of getting to know them, loving them, and then disappointing them and them leaving the church. People would often announce their unspoken expectations in me as they exited the church. I would still be left to wrestle with a sense of guilt or failure around their disappointment with me. After all, I was their pastor and it wasn’t my goal to disappoint people!
The longer I pastored, the more I realized how unhealthy and unrealistic people’s expectations could be. It wasn’t healthy for them and it wasn’t healthy for me.
So restating the original questions: How do we live life without expectations? Is it even possible or healthy? Are some expectations destructive to our spiritual health?
I have always functioned as a visionary leader with a set of realistic goals (SMART goals) and an actionable plan to execute my goals (three to five year plans broken down into annual, monthly, weekly, and daily action steps). Some of my goals were personal goals (exercise, reading, study) and some of my goals were related to the church community which I founded and built. When it came to community goals (or expectations), I had learned to lead a process of developing community goals and obtaining goal ownership with large numbers of people. When goals were accomplished, we celebrated the accomplishments and built on our successes. When we failed to meet our goals, we would evaluate, learn, adjust and move forward with new goals.
After decades of successes (and some failures), it all came crashing down for me. In a sudden and public revelation of moral failure, most of the pillars in my life were destroyed or crippled: my church community, my marriage, my career and my faith.
That was almost four years ago. Rebuilding from the ashes after decades of success has not been an easy task. Personal goals still involve things like exercise, reading, and studying, but I’ve added a few new ones like good sleep and staying sober. Community goals are slowly emerging around my new work with Spirituality Adventures (spiritualityadventures.com).
Some expectations are exceptionally unrealistic and unhealthy, either our expectations in ourselves or our expectations in other people. And these unrealistic, often times unspoken, expectations can be the source of deep disappointment, resentment and broken relationships. How do we learn to navigate expectations in a healthy way?
Our own expectations in ourselves. All of us have developed expectations related to our own self. These expectations can include character standards, core values and performance standards related to friends, family and work. Most people I know have exceptionally high standards (or expectations) for themselves, standards that they rarely achieve one hundred percent of the time. We have a gap between our highest values and our achievement of those values. As I look back on my own private failures which were made public, I had developed some almost superhuman expectations for my own moral performance. When I failed to live up to my own high standards and was publicly humiliated, I wanted to die. I was buried in shame. I had a hard time forgiving myself and believing that others would forgive me as well. Learning to embrace the values of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, humility, honesty and vulnerability in a community of people who loved me despite my personal failures was vital for my health and well-being. (This was the recovery community for me.) It is this same set of values practiced in community that can lead us to healthy expectations for personal growth and development.
Our expectations of others. Let’s face it. Honestly, we all have expectations in others: our friends, our family, our co-workers, our employees, our neighbors, our partners and our children. The better we communicate our expectations, listen to other people’s expectations, work towards solidarity and cooperation, develop good conflict resolutions skills and practice love and forgiveness towards others, the better and healthier our expectations will become. Otherwise, our expectations, almost without exception, will turn into premeditated resentments.
Our expectations of God or the Universe. If you believe in some concept of God or karma or some universal laws of love, justice, attraction and beauty, then you have probably found yourself having some set of expectations in the structure of how God or the Universe should behave. Invariably, you will be disappointed. Life rarely lives up to all of our expectations. We have to learn to radically accept life on life’s terms. I like how Richard Rohr writes about this predicament.
Richard Rohr has suggested: “Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it.” This kind of faith puts us in touch with “ultimate and humiliating realism, which for some reason demands a lot of forgiveness of almost everything” (Falling Upward, p. 63). “Forgiveness of almost everything”—forgiveness of God, the Universe, Myself, Others, Circumstances, Accidents, Injuries, Wars, Genocides, Tornadoes, Diseases, Pandemics—interesting way to think about it. Not to live in passivity and inaction, but to move forward in life with the grace of acceptance without the burden of bitterness. It’s another way of making peace with what is—dealing with life on life’s terms.
Rohr reflects: “Our first forgiveness is not toward a particular sin or offense. Our first forgiveness, it seems to me, is toward reality itself: to forgive it for being so broken, a mixture of good and bad. First that paradox has to be overcome inside of us. Then, when we allow God to hold together the opposites within us, it becomes possible to do it over there in our neighbor and even our enemy” (“Including Everything,” cac.org, August 31, 2017).
Without this kind of radical acceptance, love and forgiveness, our expectations are certainly “resentments waiting to happen.”
Shalom
©realfredherron, 2022
