The Question I have is what is the point of giving people expectations? Do we love people that way? I honestly think that if you truly loved someone you wouldn't have a false pretense of who they were and you wouldn't have a false pretense of there actions towards or against you.
I feel like the reality of expectations has made our culture extremely individualistic and selfish. Perfectionism has stemmed from this idea and so has jealously. These expectations that we put on people and that they put on us is our conceptual lenses becoming the reality of the way that we see the world. We are not people but a sequence full of events that has some correlation to the person next to us.
When this sequence of events becomes expected then the individual starts to determine his or her value by there own sequence of events. If their experiences don't match up to their determined expectations than they are therefore cast into the realm of insanity and scandal.
If a person wealthy from birth, and has had certain expectations pushed upon them from said persons to continue to achieve and go after a great amount of wealth in their adult life is ruined by a bent or conviction to go serve in the peace corp that person from wealth has become the scandal of the neighborhood.
If a person that is born in poverty, and has had certain expectations pushed upon them from said persons that they will be always in poverty, if the person born in poverty then gets out and becomes wealthy, he or she becomes the scandal of the neighborhood.
That is why the story of the Prince and the Pauper is so well known, because it is an ugly reality. This feeling that people get when they are breaking someone else's expectations is one of either complete rebellion or complete sorrow.
If two people fall in love and then start expecting that love every morning from the other person they have taken that love for granted. The love they share between each other is not a selfish love, or a love to be used, but it is a gift. A gift that each person decides to give every morning.
Now there is a difference between the actuality of expectation and the actuality of longing. To long for something brings the human being into a place of dependence. While expectation is putting the human being into a place of power and control.
My thinking is that when Jesus discipled his twelve followers he did not expect them to understand his massive human divinity rather he longed for them to understand it and to eventually live it out.
Christ does not play the ventriloquist and pull the strings when he wants us to move. He does not have any expectation for us. He loves us. He yearns for us to understand that love but he does not expect that we will.
This idea of expectation for other people trap us into becoming God. We long to control other people and a lot of times we set up expectations with communication and wait for those we 'love' to fail. We set up our children and our spouses and our friends to fail because we expect.
We think that because a person we care about is in the hospital and we pray to God for healing that God will heal us because we expect God to love us.
But what if we stopped expecting?
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