Great Expe By Bethany Woelmer
You find them everywhere:
sticking to the promises of personal relationships, attaching themselves to responsibilities and hopeful goals, and rendering themselves useful for satisfaction and gain. You find them in both the good and the bad in life, stemming from our mortal flesh through our needs and wants and racing through our veins to control our thoughts, emotions, and actions.
H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 24
They’re EVERYWHERE. And our sinful nature just cannot get rid of them, because it’s wired for control, pleasure, and self-gain. expectations. They are those little things that raise our hopes for the future and become the dependency that we create for people based on our needs and wants; those little things that fire our emotions and send them wild, either leading us toward a promising end or pushing us off the cliff of despair into the depths of our soul that is once again paralyzed with fear and anxiety for the future; those little things that secure our wellbeing and confidence yet also cause us to despair when they don’t come to pass. You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want. Holding expectations for others is really great—to a certain extent. Expecting others to behave according to their vocation and abilities and according to what we really need is reasonable. What would we possibly do without parents to take care of us, friends to support us, teachers to instruct us, doctors to heal us, cooks to feed us, and even people we don’t know to promote a greater living within the society around us? We expect because we know that we will receive, we receive because we know that we need, and we need because we can’t accomplish everything on our own. But what if we want more than we need? What if we expect too much out of people to a point that we perpetually blame them for not meeting those expectations? What if we desire more from them without appreciating the blessings they give to us on a daily basis? What if we refuse what we need and rather expect the things we want instead? We find this everywhere around us. Different standards of pleasure rule our minds, and when instant gratification is not received, we blame others instead of focusing on the blessings we do have. And when these expectations fail to be fulfilled, our thoughts and actions gain control of us and cause
