Expectations

I have told dozens of people this little nugget of wisdom.  It’s not mine mind you, but one I borrowed.  “Expectations rob joy.”

I have become very fond of this saying.

You could say I had become a believer in the lack of expectation and the perfunctory perfection of being surprised.  If you don’t expect, you can only be surprised.

There is truth in there still, but there is also truth that removing expectations can steal blessings.

We sat around the table.  For the first time in forever, there was just the six of us saying thank you.

The chair my dad once occupied was empty.  I pushed it off to the side.  I didn’t want to see or feel or hear its void.

My girls made the place cards;  I reminded them again and again that we would be “doing things differently this year.”

Different does not deliver but it does distract.

We made it through dinner well.  The kids were ecstatic about the holiday plans ahead and they are gratefully old enough to notice the food and comment on the recipes and let me know what is a keeper and a passer for next year.  I ate it up along with every buttered bite.

Then we arrived at the moment after dinner, before desert, we go person to person and salute those places and people and  circumstances for whom we are grateful.

The kids are fabulous.  They get us laughing, rejoicing and remind us that all the work that goes into this parenting thing is worth it.  They see and they hear even if most days we are sure they are blind and deaf.

My husband looked down the table at me.  I was ready, I was joy filled but then before I spoke a word, tears.  It wasn’t what I had lost, rather what I have gained and suddenly expectations did not seem the villain that I have portrayed them for so many years.

I am grateful.

I am grateful for what has been, and terrifically ecstatic about what will be. Beloveds around the table here, beloveds that will be seen again.  That expectation does not disappoint, it heals.

I smile to myself.  My children who so often do not hear, it is me whose lack of hearing has lasted a lifetime.

My mama lost two children who came and went too soon.  She spent forty years waiting to see them again.  Every one of those years, every trip to their grave she would say, “the day they went, heaven became sweeter.”

I didn’t listen until today.

Her sweetness came when her babies went home.  Mine came when she and daddy went.

The stuff and the stuffing, it’s all just decoration, it’s the divine that is starting to hold me.  I catch my breath at the thought of it.

I am getting it.  I am getting grateful.  I am learning expectations of heaven and Jesus are the grace with which we live and we die.  It is a grace filled life packed with expectation.

 “Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.” CS  Lewis