Hope and Expectations

I've been combing through my old papers and files recently and coming across some real gems.  There's a lot of dross in there, too, of course, but it's amazing the things we learn that we forget we learned.

Just now I read this:

"Jesus dared to raise people's expectations, to give them hope.  And when he didn't fulfill it, in the way they expected, they were not willing to wait, to give him the benefit of the doubt, even for those two days [between Good Friday and Easter].  That is why they had shouted for him to be crucified.

"Our problem is that we don't want to disappoint people, so we don't raise expectations.  We don't give hope for fear of failing them."

That really is pretty profound, isn't it?  We all recognize that we fail at times, that none of us can perfectly fulfill anyone else's expectations.  So we're left with a choice.

We can, on the one hand, live our lives lowering people's expectations (think Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes here) so we don't disappoint them.  That absolves us, so we think, of being the cause of anyone's depression or spite or envy.  The problem with this approach, of course, is there is no least common denominator of expectations.  You'll have to keep going lower and lower in this cycle, until at some point you become who you have tried to project yourself to be: not worth expecting from.

On the other hand, we can live our lives the way we know we should and take the risk of disappointing people.  And we will.  But this provides me opportunities, certainly, to engage people in relationship and dialogue about their expectations, and mine, and how those interrelate.

Will there be hurt with this latter approach?  You bet.  But can I really afford to live my life doing all I can simply to avoid hurt?  And if I do, will I ever accomplish anything worth doing?