Expectation vs Reality

A quick google search of Expectation vs Reality yields countless videos about the hilarity that exists in the space between what we believe will happen or what we will achieve and what actually occurs. According to these videos, action movies, boyfriends, high school, Halloween costumes, and summer break are just a few of the experiences that fail to live up to the high hopes of the teenage girls who seem to love making these videos.   

Disappointment is the feeling of unhappiness we experience when something doesn’t fulfill or hope or expectation and teenage girls aren’t the only ones who experience this feeling. Parents often experience this "space between."

I recently read a book called, “Parenting With Presence” by Susan Stiffelman. One of the exercises in the book asks the reader to consider their frustrations with parenting and the hidden expectations (and corresponding disappointments) those frustrations derive from. Stiffelman explains,    

“Many times we have trouble being attuned with and present to our child because our vision of raising children doesn’t quite match up to reality. It may even be radically different from what we expected, leaving us disappointed, discourages, or even regretful. None of this means we don’t love our children or that we wish we didn’t have them. It just means that we have feelings we need to face rather than sweeping them under the rug. It is our expectations that get us into trouble.”

This exercise forced me to face some uncomfortable realities of what I expected of myself, my husband and my children. I have been working on discovering and adjusting my expectations. This has been a humbling but rewarding work and has allowed me to practice more grace, mercy and presence with my family and myself.

Even though I’ve been working on improving this area, sometimes my unrealistic expectations still get the better of me. This Sunday I sat in the church foyer with my children as the sacrament was being passed. I was worn out and frustrated by the previous hour which had been spent wrestling church clothes on my two boys. The older one, six years old, had asked me, “Mom, do you know why I’m so slow?” He then answered his own question, “Because I want us to be late for church. I like making you late.”

I sat on the couch thinking about how I expected Sunday morning to proceed: a house filled with soft piano music, delicious pancake and bacon breakfast, children happily getting dressed, and arriving early to sit reverently in our pew. A far cry from the yelling and arguing about the necessity of fresh underpants and how long and boring testimony meeting would be.

Then I started thinking about other, bigger expectations that have gone unfulfilled. Unfair expectations I have about who my children should be and what they should love. Expectations I have for myself, for the church and her members, for my family. I realized with heaviness that the problem with expectations, and why some people say they are the root of all heartache, is that no person or institution is perfect. The experience of mortality is one where, as Paul taught, we all “fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) Even our righteousness, he said, is imperfect and leaves us all guilty before God.

Sometime between the bead and the water, while I was feeling this heaviness on my soul, I looked up. On the wall across from me was a picture that will be familiar to anyone who has spent a lot of time in LDS meeting houses. The painting is one of the Savior’s second coming. He is pictured descending in clouds, over a desert, surrounded by trumpet playing angels.  

Here was one who could be trusted to fulfill expectations. We were willing to come to this earth, this place of sin, mistakes, sickness, and heartache, because we expected Jesus Christ would keep his promise to save us. We expected him to suffer, die, and rise again for us. I thought of him, in the garden, with the weight of all our stupidity, all our meanness, our sickness and suffering, when he cried out to God to ask if there was any other way. I imagined, too, the weight of our expectations. Were we there, in heaven, holding our breath, waiting, hoping, and praying for him upon whom our salvation depended?  

And now we wait for the fulfillment of another expectation, that he will come again. As I looked into his face, with his arms outstretched, my heart ached for that day. I remembered a scripture from the the 62nd Psalm: “My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him … Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.” Here is the one time, the one person, in whom I can safely trust to be true to the expectation of perfect love, mercy, grace, and justice. He will always be there to listen when I call, will always forgive when I stumble, and will always help when I turn to him.

     

The Power of Remembering

In a church with a lay ministry, every Sunday is an adventure. Like that famed box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get. Usually the sermons are repetitions of General Conference addresses or recaps of scripture stories. Occasionally you get a politically or socially charged topic or a speaker who goes completely off the “safe” script and delves into life details that most would keep private. To those who, like me, may have tender feelings close to the surface, church attendance can be more of a spiritual minefield that a chocolate tasting.

Yesterday, I sat in the pew with my children as we usually do. We sang the hymns, listened to the prayers, took the bread and water. I tried to help them sit quietly while trying to listen to the speakers myself. Our ward had a full program with three youth speakers and two adults. Things went smoothly and predictably through talks of scripture heroes and a sermon on agency. When the last speaker got up, he had only 10 minutes left and hurriedly worked to condense his planned talk, a rendition of a General Conference talk, “Choose the Light.”      

One of the challenges we face, said the speaker, was that of living in the information age where so much is available on the internet. Deciding what is true and uplifting can be difficult. There are those who seek to destroy faith by publishing and sharing criticisms of church policy and past and present leaders. Most of their information is false, especially the claims about how the church uses tithing funds and the claims about things Joseph Smith did. The people publishing this information hide behind the anonymity of the internet and their words are given more import than they should. But, if our faith is strong, if we pray and read our scriptures enough, we will not be overcome by the darkness.  

My first reaction was to feel resentful and insulted. The implications of this brother’s words was that I don’t know what I’m talking about when I have legitimate concerns with policy, doctrine,and history or that I am willfully seeking to destroy faith. He suggested that maybe I just wasn’t praying enough or didn’t have enough faith and that I was being deceived.

He doesn’t know, I thought angrily. He doesn’t know how much I have prayed, coming close to praying without ceasing at times. I have continued to pray when the answers are slow to come. He doesn’t know the time I have spent studying, seeking to find comforting answers, only to come up empty handed. He doesn’t know how hard it is for me to come to church some Sundays when the only thing that gets me in the pew is a desperate desire to believe and a spiritual conviction of where my Heavenly Parents want be to be.

Then I looked up, through watery eyes and saw my bishop. He looked right at me and smiled with immense gentleness. Because he knows me and our family, I think he could guess how the speaker’s words were affecting me. I’m not sure what he would have said to me if we hadn’t been across the room, but he didn’t need to say anything. In his eyes and his smile, for a moment, I felt peace knowing that at least one person knew who I was and loved me just as I am.

I quickly looked away to hide a tear. I thanked God for the moment and asked him to help me to love others this way. I remembered the words of the sacrament hymn we had sung just a few minutes earlier. I thought of the sacrament prayer, and my covenant to always remember the sacrifice of my Savior. I remembered His words, in the midst of pain, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  

I am so far from perfect and make countless mistakes. I am deeply humbled by and indebted to the sacrifice that cleanses me from my sins and makes me new again. I have never known the weight of injustice that our Savior experienced. I have so little to forgive. I needed strength though, help to let go of the pride that told me I was justified in offence. I needed power to turn my heart soft, allowing it to be bruised and healed and bruised again. 

I looked up at the speaker and thought, you know what, he doesn’t know. His lived experience is all he knows. He doesn’t know me or the others like me. The resentment and frustration from feeling misunderstood and misrepresented in such a public forum melted away. As I remembered Jesus Christ and my covenant to try to emulate Him, I was filled with a love and gentle peace beyond my own. 

A mild voice whispered to me, "This is grace. This is Christ's power to change who you are and make you like Him. It happens like this, one small step, one small change a time."

Quote: Love To Pray

African American Woman by Brandy Kayzakian-Rowe

Love to pray – 
feel often during the day the need for prayer, and take [the] trouble to pray. Prayer enlarges the heart until it is capable of containing God’s gift of himself. Ask and seek, and your heart will grow big enough to receive him and keep him as your own … The more we receive in silent prayer, the more we can give in our active life. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say, but what God says to us and through us. All our words will be useless unless they come from within – words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
- from “Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta,” by Malcolm Muggeridge

The Lord doesn't want just pretty prayers. 
He wants real prayers. Sometimes we think of those eloquent, gracious prayers in sacrament meeting and general conference as the models for our personal prayers. We try to organize our rough thoughts into smooth sentences and it seems hard. We know how to say, “I’m so grateful for our son who is on his mission,” but we might not know how to say, “I’m so scared and so mad about our son who is on drugs.” Heavenly Father wants to hear the scared and mad prayers just as much as he wants to hear the grateful prayers.

When Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was honest about how hard the Atonement was going to be for him when he prayed that the cup might pass from him. He struggled with a “very heavy” burden of feelings, saying, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful unto death,” and he prayed, “Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me” (Mark 14:33-34, 36). He was honest about how much he didn’t like what was happening; and I think it’s because of his honesty that we so revere the love and humility revealed by the rest of his prayer: “Nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt (Mark 14:36).
- from Sanctuary, page 18-19 by Chieko Okazaki