Mother Lion and Cub from Pinterest
Thomas Wolfe’s novel You Can’t Go Home Again has become a catchphrase, a metaphor of the impossibility because people and places inevitably change. After six decades of three annual trips to the Sierras, I then entirely missed three years, for various reasons. So I eagerly expected a great return to my beloved Rock Creek above Tom’s Place. A relatively minor change in my favorite camping spot should have brought Wolfe’s line to mind on greater changes. It did not.
Been gone too long
to expect to step back in
with things just the same
three years without fishing my beloved Sierra high country
three years of lessened exercise due to health issues
three years of decreased endurance and energy due to meds
Day One at 7,500 feet
fishing uphill on a brushy stream
exhausted
heart pounding
needing to find convenient rocks
to collapse on
allowing the pulse to slow
hobbling, slowly, with a bad knee
over rocks I once bounded over
nearly stumbling often
and fully once
Day Four at 9,000 feet
doing better
acclimating
pondering a new knee
Though hope lies eternal in the human breast
I finally expect less
Expectations can certainly discourage us. More than just hoping, I expected this trip to touch my soul like the earlier. But I couldn’t go home to what had been, my physical condition had changed beyond my awareness of the extent. I blew Paul’s injunction, “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment” (Romans 12:3).
Not sure this would qualify quality-wise as a poem, but I learned its lesson decades back, then apparently forgot it: “Never allow hope to grow into expectation; that merely breeds disappointment.”
The lesson: temper our expectations. Much of what we hope for exceeds our control. People can interfere. Life interrupts. And sometimes God steps in with something better. So we hope, we pray, we do what we can, but we wisely don’t expect them all to arrive. A passage in Ezekiel uses a mother lion as a metaphor for Israel, with her cubs becoming the kings, “When she saw her hope unfulfilled, her expectation gone, she took another of her cubs and made him a strong lion” (Ezekiel 19:5).
So, a couple of tips on how to manage our hopes and expectations.
First, be cautious with expecting things beyond what God has promised. We all have dreams and goals, so we pray and act and hope. But God qualifies an oft-quoted promise, “Delight yourself in the LORD and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Proverbs 37:4). We get the desires of our hearts…when our delight is in God and not our own desires.
Second, like the momma lion, when your expectations don’t come to pass, adapt. Don’t quit. And realize that God always loves and guides and comforts us, even when our expectations aren’t met.
Kick Starting the Application
How do you choose to allow hopes to grow into expectations? Do you expect things that God hasn’t promised? Do you delight in him above all else?