I recently listened to an interview with a woman who differentiated between having expectations of God and remaining expectant. Having expectations of God often implies anticipating a specific outcome, forcing God’s faithfulness to fit within the bounds of our own definitions. Remaining expectant, however, means focusing on who God is, trusting his character no matter the circumstance. It requires an open-handedness; holding onto his promises regardless of the ultimate outcome.
This distinction was helpful for me as I continue to navigate the difficulty of hope after loss. I hoped God would bring healing and when it didn’t come, or at least not in the way I was hoping, I found my heart was crushed. In an effort to guard my heart from further disappointment, I put both expectation and expectancy into the shadows.
When grounded in truth, expectation is not inherently bad; it can actually be the essence of expectancy. I can expect God to be faithful to all he has promised. The issue comes, however, when my focus shifts from who he is to how I want to see his goodness displayed. After facing devastating loss, my heart has coped by giving up expectations entirely. In doing so, I am realizing that in many ways, I also gave up expectancy—which has looked a lot like struggling to hope.
Rather than expecting results, true expectancy looks like humble submission. It is an open-handed trust that because God is good, because he is kind, because he has promised to work all things together for good for those who love him, no matter the situation or circumstance, he can be trusted. It is a deep reliance on his character, independent of our circumstances.
I can see now that a piece of why hope and prayer have still felt difficult is because I have still been trying to pray with expectations; asking for outcomes beyond what God has promised. I still struggle to know what it is to pray without letting specific desires or expectations take the driver’s seat.
I believe “God is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think” (Ephesians 3:20), yet I am still drawn to asking with expectation of what this may look like rather than rooting my prayers in who God is. I think I have lost what it is to remain expectant as I battle to lay down my own expectations. I am realizing a part of healing is finding the fight to remain steadfast in expectancy.
A beautiful piece of expectancy is that it embraces the practice of lament; recognizing two seemingly contradictory realities can exist side by side. We can be “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). It holds grief in one hand and the hope of Christ in the other. It declares that even in the midst of the sorrow, the Lord is present, good, and trustworthy.
In many ways, learning the discipline of expectancy requires my heart to risk hoping once again and that still feels hard and somewhat scary. Yet I also recognize that this discipline brings with it a beautiful humility and deeper trust in God. Expectancy is an act of surrender, anchored to hope in Christ himself and this, “hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5).
Leave a Reply