Expectation vs. Expectancy

 I've lost count of how many times I've spoken the words.  

Maybe they were said silently in my mind and heart with only God's ears able to hear them.

Perhaps they were spoken aloud to the heavens, flung into the universe with an aching tone attached. 

Nevertheless, they've been said. And whichever way they've been said, they've been meant and felt... every one: 

It wasn't supposed to be this way.  

When the picture in my brain has been surprisingly altered in ways I did not see coming, I've stated this fact-matter in the most wounded way possible. I am a writer. A creative. Someone with visual gifting and an unusual sense of intuition that often can see things coming. Even as a kid, I hated surprises and startles, preferring to stick with the predictable and anticipate any unforeseen situations so I wouldn't be caught off guard. Yet the odd thing has been, through the years, my life has become anything but certain. Most of my adult life has been spent responding to unplanned or unwanted pain and wondering why it had to go this way. Why God allowed such a thing. For someone who has loved to write stories all her life, it's gone against everything I've liked or known. It's gone against the very core of who I am. 

I spent years mad at God because of this. It all seemed like an unnecessary tragedy... to ask someone who has tried to be good all their life to walk through pain that appeared underserved and unwanted. Perhaps you've wrestled with the same. The things that have befallen you have seemed so undesirable and you wonder where God is in the midst or why you find yourself here. Something feels violated. The picture was supposed to be different. The story wasn't meant to go this way. It feels like something or someone you deeply cared for was ripped out of your clenching hands and all you're left with emptiness and wishing for bygone memories that will never come back. I know what that's like. 

And it wasn't until years later that I started to realize that I was never the one with the storyline anyway. I was never made privy to the script. I do not hold the pen, neither will I ever have the chance to. All my life is built of a series of responses - good or bad - to the happenings of a story that only God knows. In a world of entitlement, it seems contrary to believe in and trust a God who writes good stories... especially when the twists in those stories seem so counter to what we think we know about Him. 

Mystery. The key to making sense of the senseless. To sitting with the not-right and daring to cling to a hope that has faith in a God who eventually makes all things right. 

So many things have taken place in my life that I would've never chosen. I would've asked for something else. Anything else other than what has been placed in my hands. I would've never prayed for or wanted the level of loss and pain that's accompanied my journey for so many years. The storyteller in me has often told God that it all could've been so much better without this. Life would've been happier. Easier. And yet... did He ever say that that's what living was about anyway? After all, weren't His words that our walk through this broken world would be filled with trouble but the challenge was for us to take heart because He has already won? 

I heard someone say recently that there's a difference between expectation and expectancy. While the dictionary may define them similarly, our posture in both is radically different. When one is creating a life centered around expectations, everyone and everything around them has to meet certain levels of perfection and satisfaction in order for life to be good. When one is choosing to live with expectancy, life is all one giant gift waiting to be discovered. Instead of being filled with disappointment, one is filled with curiosity and anticipation. Rather than always seeing the lack and shortcomings in everything, one is assumes a good intent behind everything and everyone. When one is based around entitlement, the other is built on gratitude. 

Somehow, this resonates deeply because, even now, I am walking through some situations that, yet again, feel unwanted. They leave me with more questions than answers, asking of me a greater depth of faith to trust once more that the Hand that is writing the lines to my story knows full well what is best. I actually had to say this to somebody recently when they said that it must be hard to find inspiration for writing when life is hard and I replied that some of my best things I've written have been from an aching soul when all seemed so very dark. 

See, this is the way of God. This is the journey of discovering grace in the shattered mess that is the imperfect. For God never pens bad stories. Over and over, I've had to yield my own script to His and tell myself that He will make something good of this yet. No, it may not bring back what once felt so happy and good. And I may still have to burn the image of what I thought was the ideal outcome for how I wished something to be. But, in that surrender, I find I'm being shaped into someone new. Someone who knows the reality of hardship and realizes that whatever I have was only on loan to me anyway. And as it was a gift in the first place, requested by God to be stewarded for a season, it can be its own gift to hand it back to God and continue to say yes, even when what has happened feels so very wrong and unsettling. 

Maybe, from my point of view, it wasn't supposed to be this way. But equally true, from God's perspective, perhaps this was the intent all along and to do it any other way would not produce the fruit that He envisioned from the beginning. And if this was the purpose from before the creation of the world, who am I to wish it any differently than how the Maker wants it.