- Expectations

I've been thinking about why we get so upset when things go wrong...when things don't go the way we think they should. Why are we so surprised when our lives have twists and turns...detours...dead ends...?

And I think I can answer that in a word. It's "expectations".

We expect things to go well...and then they don't.
We expect our health to be good...and then it isn't.
We expect people to treat us with kindness and respect...but they don't always do that.
We expect - maybe subconsciously - that our lives will go as planned...but isn't that just like life, not to?

And so I'm realizing that while it's not wrong to have expectations for good, those very same expectations can sink us in the end...create false images of what's going to happen...get our hopes up so high, we feel we're gonna fly any minute, only to have our hopes dashed to the ground. And dashed hopes can lead to a desperate despair that is very, very difficult to recover from.

In the back of my mind, I've always half-expected this cancer. I'm not being negative; not at all. Maybe a better way of saying it is that I've been prepared for this moment, this season, for many years.

- I watching my mom wrestle with cancer four times in her life: kidney, lung, and twice in her right breast. She died in 1991, not of cancer, ironically, but from COPD - Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

- Her sister had breast cancer twice, and then succumbed to cancer in her spine.

- My dad - my dear dad - was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma four years ago and died of this particular cancer that settles in the kidney and the bone marrow.

- And now my mother's sister's daughter - my cousin - is dying of terminal cancer.

That's nine cancers in our small little family circle, and eight of those are in the women, and four of those eight are cancers in the breast. So it's kind of a family tradition, you might say.

And so I have hoped for good health, but I have not had unreasonable expectations to be healthy, if that makes sense.

I have not demanded that God, or the universe, or good fortune, or good genes, give me good health.

I am a mere human, and I don't have that kind of pull, nor influence, nor clout.

I have never said "why me?" I think that is a silly saying.

Why not me, for goodness sake? I am not exempt from human suffering.

Asking "why me?" is sometimes like saying "why not someone else instead of me?" Sheesh! I wouldn't wish this on anybody. I wouldn't want you to have this instead of me. And so I say "why not me?"

Of the late Edward Kennedy, Barack Obama said that Americans are left with one image of him: "a man on a boat; white mane tousled; smiling broadly as he sails into the wind, ready for what storms may come, carrying on toward some new and wondrous place just beyond the horizon."

Robert Louis Stevenson said: "The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek."

And so we'll see where this adventure leads. Who knows what good can come out of the things God allows into our lives? He may be allowing me an ever-expanding circle of influence as He brings me through this experience, and it will be grand, and it will be good, because He will get all the glory! :)


"God has formed us for Himself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Him." St. Augustine