Gibberish?

3/18/2007

I was deleting more of those criptic spam messages this morning (the ones that almost sound like a story). One of them actually had very logical sentences in it so I read the whole thing (what?! I was bored) :) Anyway, one of the phrases that caught my attention was, "as a human being, if you don't fit competitions, you'll be eliminated like dinosaurs." Of course the next sentence read, "in nurse periwinkle's romantic fancy, they needn't see or speak to anyone" So I'm not pretending it was some cosmic message. But it did get me thinking.

I just started a new Bible study last night called the "explorer groups" where we will 'explore' less conventional topics for Bible Studies (like the Apocropha and different canons of the Bible - very interesting stuff!) Anyway, as an starting point for this study, the leader asked several questions about where each of us were in our Spiritual Journey and one of the questions that came up was, 'What is it that steals your joy?' One of the girls answered:

"Expectations. Ones put on you, ones you put on yourself, ones you put on others (that they can't live up to) and ones you put on life in general and how things are 'supposed' to be."

I can't tell you how true that is for me. And how hard its been dealing with the let down that things won't always work out the way you hoped they would. Some change or mistake can ruin a relationship forever. Even being aware that it was a silly expectation to begin with doesn't change how I feel about it. Where do we get these ideas from? And why do they become so important? I would think God must feel that way about us sometimes. We ruined his perfect plan (the perfect set up). We don't fit competitions or even come close to measuring up. How disappointing. And yet He's somehow able to get over it; to continue to love us as if we were still perfect.