Not-So-Great Expectations (Part 1 of 2)

Expectations are part of the human experience. Travelers expect their hotel room to be clean. Store owners expect the customers to pay for their purchases. Children expect their parents to feed them, calm them, and protect them. Spouses bring all kinds of expectations into their marriage relationship – some realistic and others impossible.

I have come to appreciate just how omnipresent expectations are. Much like the force of gravity, we tend to take expectations as a given without much reflection.

But unconscious or unspoken expectations can be explosions waiting to go off. Many workplaces experience preventable conflict as a result of not having accurate or realistic job descriptions. Many a marital fight erupts because husband and wife are bringing different expectations to a situation. Many a peer suddenly feels a flood of self-pity or resentment or loneliness because others didn’t magically pick up on their subtle hints or unspoken cues. I suspect that many of the racial and cultural tensions in our nation and in our world are also due to mismatched and miscommunicated expectations.

Not all expectations are equal. There are everyday expectations that help govern healthy human interaction: exchanges of goods and services, classroom rules, household tasks, driving etiquette, and so forth. Even in those legitimate instances, it usually helps to communicate the expectations verbally or in writing. Then there are our stronger expectations, the ones that tend to fester and fume. That is because they are propelled by a much deeper drive from within the human heart: our core human desires and our emotional, spiritual, and physical needs. When ignored, these (fundamentally good) desires and needs become unruly, even destructive forces.

We tend to be out of touch with what we are really feeling and with what our heart most deeply desires. Indeed, in God’s design, we only discover these personal truths in communion with Him and others. We are mysteries unto ourselves and need healthy relationships to be fully human.

Healthy relationships include communication, asking, receiving, and giving. The healthiest and holiest people I know have learned how to communicate with God and others about what they feel, what they truly need, and what they truly desire. They have learned to be vulnerable and trusting. They humbly ask for what they need rather than taking, manipulating, or silently expecting.

But are we attuned to our emotions, our desires, our needs? I know that I have not always been. Even though I was a man of prayer for many years, I tended not to pay attention to my emotional and spiritual health. Indeed, I spent much of my life brushing aside any sense of “emotional needs” as selfish psychobabble.

I was merely following the script that I learned long ago. As a child, I internalized certain distorted beliefs about myself: that my emotions could be put on the shelf indefinitely, that they didn’t really matter. I could just tough it out and life would go on. My job was to pull it together, to work harder, and to figure out a better solution. To most outside observers, my life was one “success” after another, so this plan seemed to be working fine – until it didn’t. I finally reached a painful awareness that I could not manage, could not cope, and could not figure things out by myself.

In my childhood home, we had one massive omnipresent expectation – at all costs we had to keep my stepdad from blowing up. Whatever feelings or spiritual needs that I had in those moments had to wait – some of them many years. When I finally became more in tune with them (with the help of God, the Virgin Mary, and certain wonderful friends) I was stunned at what powerful and deep currents were swirling in the depths of my heart. I have been learning to reach out and meekly ask the appropriate people for help and support. The more I do so, the more free I am to love and serve with an undivided heart in my calling as a shepherd of souls.

One book that has been life-changing for me is Seven Desires by Mark and Debbie Laaser. They make the claim that every human heart has certain universal desires: to be heard and understood, to be affirmed, to be blessed, to be safe, to be touched in a meaningful way, to be chosen, and to be included. If we feel a void in one or more of those desires, we can easily start placing expectations on others, and harbor blame if they fall short of those expectations. In truth, it is unreasonable to expect others to fulfill our own deepest longings. But we will slide into that behavior if we feel empty on the inside.

It struck me that Jesus and Mary themselves, the New Adam and the New Eve, experienced these seven human desires no less than we did. Indeed, God willed that they be fulfilled in those desires. Not everyone understood Jesus or blessed him or chose him – but certain key people did, not to mention God Himself. In the Gospels, Jesus and Mary were both unabashed in asking for and receiving help from others. They depended radically and constantly on the Father in all things. So there was in them no taking or grasping or striving for the needs of their heart. They freely asked and freely received. In the same true freedom, they gave everything on Good Friday.

I am still learning how to be free like them. More on that point next time.

To be continued…