Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
Phillippians 3:12
If my situation changes, does that mean that my expectations should change as well?
Was going through some of the cards, well-wishes and prophecies that I received just before coming to Brazil the other night, it made for an interesting read. The cards were filled with hope, love, faith for the future, and all these tied in with expectation of what my time here was going to be like.
That’s the thing with talking about the future - it’s all about expectation. We don’t know exactly how things are going to pan out, it’s what make ‘tomorrow’ different from ‘today’. Sometimes we can’t choose exactly what set of circumstances are going to befall us - but we can choose how we respond to them.
The expectations we have for the future are usually a set of ‘better-than-average outcomes’. So what happens when our expectations (sometimes prophetic in nature) - that we’ve spent time, effort and emotion investing into - don’t match with our reality, our experience?
I was thinking about this when going through the cards - my expectations were formed when I was in a comfortable situation, when I was surrounded by my friends, when I knew what language I was speaking, and where I knew what boundaries existed. If my situation changes, does that mean that my expectations should change as well?
I don’t think it does. Personally - it just means that there’s a bigger gap between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘reality’, and a greater degree of frustration. I don’t think it’s right to drop or lower personal goals based upon exterior circumstances. Of course, it’s a different matter if it turns out the expectations and goals are made impossible, or highly improbably by physical conditions or burn out - but this isn’t that common for most people.
The expectations I form in a comfortable environment should not change when in a worse environment - it just means I need to make my new environment more comfortable.
Which is what I’m choosing to do now. I can decide to fight against the new environment (ignoring the situation I’m in, and focusing purely on what I want to happen), in which case wasting energy staying the same. I can decide to totally modify myself to the environment (which is changing the ideal to what is already reality), which doesn’t appear to be hugely beneficial as it would involve creating a new identity from scratch. Or I can decide to accept and modify aspects of the environment and myself in unison (using the reality in front of me to modify those aspects that will help me towards the ideal), and have a sort of ‘hybrid’ of reality and ideal.
It’s this last option I am taking. I want to be comfortable (that is, at ease) with my surrounding, but at the same time realise that my ideal hasn’t changed - that I can still aim towards the same ideal, just perhaps in a different way to what I first thought.
These are just some preliminary thoughts - been reading John Maxwell, which is probably why these thoughts are so ‘formal’.
Only for the King
Jx
