Saturday, June 28, 2008

Great Expectations Or Ruined Relationships?


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?

Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Coming


The Coming is like feeling the winds of a tornado.

These winds do not feel natural as they ripple around you and through you. The rain you can protect yourself from, the lightening and the thunder are in the distance but the winds are a natural erosion.

That is what the coming feels like. It feels like a natural erosion that seems to rip through my being. The Coming has shaked and thrown my existence around like a rag doll.

The interesting reality is that when an individual comes back to the coming they start to realize how destructive it actually is.

Tornado winds eventually stop but The Coming winds are poisonous. These winds eventually stop but they leave you with a feeling that seems to never stop. You always feel like you are in a whirlwind of destructive thoughts and emotions.

And if you stick around The Coming for too long you find that you start to think that the destruction is natural and normal. You get used to the erosion and it becomes part of your daily self reflection.

Then The Coming starts living through you. It starts seeping through your pores and infects your conversations. It eventually infests your relationships and starts to erode them. The Coming flows through your being into the other people around you and starts to influence their being as well.

Monday, June 02, 2008

"Ugly As Homemade Sin"

When families are called to undertake the responsibility of the individual sin.


Brought to you by the book of Deuteronomy.


Coming soon to this blog near you...