A question was posed to a friend recently divorced: where do you see yourself in five years? She was reluctant to answer, even to herself. It requires some honest introspection. I share that reticence. Not because I don’t have dreams and hopes and aspirations. I do. But the longer life circumstances continually take turns away from them, the more hesitant I am. It has taught me to live without expectation.
Sounds depressing. Dark. Hopeless. Joyless. Purposeless….
Yet, this is not how I would define my life at all. Just the opposite. For when most people dream dreams and cast visions for their 5 or 10 or 50 year plan, the focus is on the “what.” What I shall be doing? What is the plan for getting there? What I shall accomplish after arriving? What I shall possess and what will make me happy? Or comfortable?
When life wrecked dream after dream, it finally cornered me. I asked of myself — of God — what the plan was. I was seeking the answer to that “what” question. But God’s ways are not ours. His purpose is driven by a wildly paradoxical way of thinking. An incomprehensible zeal for us to be more than this world can dream or achieve.
His answer moved me out of my comfort zone Christianity, from the Egypt of religion to the wilderness of living in crazy faith. It is not always comfortable. Most days it’s uncomfortable. Unfamiliar. There have been moments of thinking how much easier it would be to go back to Egypt’s steady and inviting predictability. Wilderness faith means the God of the impossible must split hard rock so springs will flow, and lay manna sweet to be gathered with each morning’s dew. Every uncharted step must be taken with Him, for Him to choose if that day or week or even year is spent moving…. Or waiting. So much more waiting than I would have imagined or preferred. But I have learned He has deep purpose in both the moving and the waiting. It becomes a life more truly set on things above, things unseen because it is more deeply hidden in the heart of God. Hid with Christ in God. In the heart of God aflame, burning with enthusiastically passionate determination. A life white hot. Not lukewarm.
As I wrested this whole thing down with Him several years ago, He literally moved me out of doing life lukewarm. In America I think this is actually a very hard thing for Him to get after in our lives, no matter how sincere our faith. It took this wilderness-stripping-down in my life of all expectation. To live without expectation of the “what” is to entirely yield, surrender, every last fragment of what we think life should look like and be about. Jesus invites us to it. To lose our life for Him. Into His. Right there, in laying that last shred of my plans and hopes and dreams, even my rights, down — entirely empty — in the space of uncertainty, something ignited within. An entirely transformed perspective on “expectation.” It began in Psalm 62:5 (NKJV): O my soul, be silent unto God for my expectation is from Him.
“…my expectation is from Him.”
In that split second of silence God was pretty loud: Get quiet. Undistracted. Stop planning because you really aren’t the one in control and I have something so much indescribably better for you if you would just let Me give you My expectation for your life. The wilderness is worth the white hot faith you will gain, aflame with expectancy.
The difference seems subtle, but the power of expectancy versus expectation shifts everything. Expectancy lives with His expectation for us. Holy, Christ-centered, God-filled expectancy will burn with His zeal and passionate purpose. It is a backdraft: all the oxygen of our controlled life emptied, and then through the smallest opening of faith the breath of God fills explosively. Fills us with with everything He is and desires to be within us. His spirit fuels a life of joy and peace and hope and purpose that has very little to do with the “whats” of this world and everything to do with WHO. Living with transformed expectation in Who ignites glory driven purpose to be be the woman He died to make me. I have learned that to live white hot is about letting this world go — controlling the details of the plans we imagine — and instead gladly abandoning to the One whose emblazoned purpose will take us places we could not imagine. Expectancy.
So it does not matter if my 5, 10, 50 year future has me still in my same job or traversing foreign lands as a missionary, single or married, doing great things or ordinary things, I see myself living deeper in His heart, with a faith on fire for His glory. I see myself growing in radiant beauty — a gentle and quiet and joyously adventurous spirit resting in Him. I see myself living out His plan that He only unfolds in seemingly 10 foot increments, and being at peace in the uncertainty. I see myself learning more every day to let that uncertainty fan faith into flame. Again, paradoxically, uncertainty with expectancy keeps me pressed close to Him. And the closer I am to His heart, the more I am consumed with His white hot love and purpose. Yes, I will do this far from perfectly. But I will do this life of expectant brilliancy with Him.
Threads of His voice in these glad abandon faith verses: Luke 9:23-24; John 12:24-25; Col. 3:1-3; Mt. 6:21,33; John 15:9-11 and 17:13; Eph. 1:3-14,17-18
promisewords 