Expectations and Conflict: Part II

Consider your story by journaling about the following questions:

○ What have I expected of others?

○ What have others expected of me?

○ How have these expectations impacted my life? How might they threaten my recovery and spiritual transformation?

A Meditation Moment

Sit quietly and recite the first part of the serenity prayer. Pause after each phrase.

God [pause]

Grant me serenity [pause]

To accept the things I cannot change [pause]

Take a few moments to imagine God listening to your request for serenity. Imagine how you might find serenity today. Pause and consider the things that you wish would change, but you have no power to change. End with a repetition of God, Grant me serenity...

Competing expectations lead to conflict

The young woman sitting before me was striking.  Her makeup was dramatic with eyeliner stretching far beyond the corner of her eyes.  Her jeans were fashionably ripped, as were mine, but her jeans were more hole than fabric.  Mine just had a couple of half-hearted shreds.  A beret sat jauntily on her head and her lips were ruby red.  Her eyeshadow was deep violet.  She practically purred like a cat stalking a mouse.  I knew my role: I was the mouse.  She came in with a list of complaints she wished to lodge against her mother.  She wanted to “clear up any confusion” necessary for me to “get her mother back on track”.  Interesting, I thought. 

Just a few hours before, her mother had sat in the same chair.  She wore pearls and a tailored suit with four inch heels and a no-nonsense attitude.  Her makeup was muted but I suspected botox made her minimalist approach possible. 

Both women came loaded with expectations despite their very different presentations.  They had expectations of each other; they had expectations of me.  These expectations competed with one another for both attention and energy.  Sides needed to be taken, control needed to be exerted if anyone was going to emerge as victor.

This is how each of us experience life.  No wonder we use substances to numb and forget!  This is not how God operates.  He has much to teach us about stating both our needs and our wants clearly without demanding that someone else change to meet them.  God gives us guidance for how we can take responsibility for our own lives within the context of surrendering to his will.  This frees us from the pressure to bend to the expectations of others.  This does not mean that we get our way.  What it means is we get out of the way of all those loaded conversations where people are trying to either please or control one another.  It relieves the stress of having to figure out who in the room wins and what our part is in each skirmish.  Instead, we are given the gift of boundaries.  We begin to learn how to live within the boundaries of God’s care for us.  This is a lot HARDER to figure out than it sounds.

A soundtrack played in my head as I listened to these two women exert tremendous effort to get the other person to make them feel less anxious by asking me to serve as a velvet hammer that each wielded against the other.  The band Cake’s song Short Skirt, Long Jacket rang in my inner ear.  It speaks of expectations, often competing ones.  It sets the bar high for some random girl that is somehow supposed to fix the world of the guy who sings it.  We do not have to live this way.  But tremendous humility and willingness to change will be required if we want to get out from under the weight of living in a world that only loves winners.

God looks for people to bless

Just after that, Hanani the seer came to Asa king of Judah and said, “Because you went for help to the king of Aram and didn’t ask God for help, you’ve lost a victory over the army of the king of Aram. Didn’t the Ethiopians and Libyans come against you with superior forces, completely outclassing you with their chariots and cavalry? But you asked God for help and he gave you the victory. God is always on the alert, constantly on the lookout for people who are totally committed to him. You were foolish to go for human help when you could have had God’s help. Now you’re in trouble—one round of war after another.”

~2 Chronicles 16:9, The Message

One of my favorite things about the Bible is its honesty. Time and again it teaches us how forgetful we humans are when it comes to our fragility and God’s patience with us. “God is always on the alert, constantly on the lookout for people who are totally committed to him.”

As ambivalent as so many of us feel when we think about firing ourselves as CEO of our lives (known in recovery circles as the Third Step), this is the part of a spiritual pilgrimage that is simple - sort of. It requires only one thing of us: we make a decision.

How simple is this step? It is so simple that…

You do not have to understand what it means.

You do not have to join any organizations to prove your commitment.

You do not have to change a single behavior, belief, thought or feeling.

You do not have to convince others or even yourself of your sincerity.

The one thing that you have to do in order to proceed on your journey of faith is to accept this one thing: God is on the alert and he is looking for committed people to bless. That’s it.

On taking the Third Step….“There [is] definitely no drama around it. It [is] just an act of willingness”[1]

~ By the Book

[1] https://www.nacr.org/center-for-12-step-recovery/by-the-book-doing-the-twelve-steps/by-the-book-step-3 at 13:30.

Defensiveness is not a strategy

Years ago I had the grand privilege of teaching high schoolers each Sunday morning. Man, are they smart. And funny. And irreverent. And loaded with potential. If you do not have the privilege of really digging in and spending quantity (quantity - not quality) time with this group, it may be tough to appreciate the depth of their curiosity and their capacity to ferret out BS when they see it.

I had this one kid whose attendance was sporadic, and when he was there he was not exactly dialed in. This made me curious. Mostly he looked hung over on Sundays and there were some rumors about his extracurricular activities and the possibility that he might be a bad influence on the other kids in the group.

One day while buying groceries and junk food for my kids, his dad approached me about his son’s “religious education” and chastised me for his son’s sporadic attendance and his lack of bible knowledge (as evidenced by his inability to quote scripture verses from memory). This, according to him, was a reflection of my poor teaching and my lack of commitment.

So here is the thing about this story. This dad did not go to church. At. All. At the time I was super mad. But after I paused to prepare and really thought the story through, I felt an increased responsibility to this young man. I redoubled my efforts. I did NOT ask the kid to memorize scriptures but I did a few small things to increase his awareness that we teachers saw him. Cared about him. And without saying a word to anyone else about the encounter with the dad - who I would not have even recognized except for the fact that his kid was with him (yes, he said all this in front of his son) - we upped our game.

This was super hard. I wanted to “out” the dad for being a deadbeat. I wanted to whine and complain about all my weekly efforts and this dad’s absence from the life of his kid and I wanted to shout from the rooftops, “HOW DARE HE!!” But the problem with this approach was that it would not have been helpful to the kid, and that was my priority. That was in-line with my core value of loving kids as an expression of bearing God’s image. He already had one fun house mirror of a father image, did he need me tarnishing it further? No.

I do not know where this young man is today. I do know he made his way, eventually, to seminary. This is no guarantee that he has pursued a life of faith but I am pretty sure it required continued exposure to God’s word. I know that he has had a profound influence on my life. He is the kid that opened my eyes to all the ways we judge others and make assumptions about them. He made me realize I could do more - not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

It’s okay to learn even from people who don’t have it all together and even those who stir your anger. It’s okay to find inspiration in rumors of failure or in the face of criticism. How might God be getting your attention today through weird means and mean people?