My first Christmas as a wife was horrible. I blame my dad for this. Each year, he sought out the perfect gift for my mom, the thing she never would have bought for herself, the gift that would make happy tears fall, and then he presented it to her on Christmas morning, between the coffee and the sausage casserole, and we would all end up in sentimental tears.
The problem was, I married a person who really wasn’t into gifts, but I forgot to mention to him that I DID NOT AGREE WITH HIM. On our first Christmas morning together, I couldn’t wait for him to open the things I’d bought for him: New shirts, a set of his favorite movie trilogy on VHS (fancy times, people!), a stocking I had hand-painted and filled with treats. He smiled and then gave me my gifts to open. At first, I was sure he was kidding when I opened my first item: A water filter for our kitchen sink. Oh, what a prankster he was! How had I never picked up on this trait during our dating days? I tore into the next package, prepared to smile in delight, but delight was not the emotion I felt when I saw that this gift was a turkey baster. For me. Someone who had never cooked or basted a bird in her entire twenty-two years of life. Nowadays, we look back on that first Christmas and laugh, but I can assure you that there was no laughing in our house that morning. My expectations of a magical Christmas with something sparkly under the tree were dashed.
Often, life has not met my expectations. Often, Jesus has not met my expectations either. He didn’t say yes to the diagnosis I wanted. He didn’t change a person’s mind when I prayed it would change. He didn’t heal the disease I prayed he would. He let a person I love pass away. He didn’t make the rough paths smooth.
I can find small, silly ways or deep, hurtful ways life should have been different. You can, too. It might be a child who isn’t what you thought he or she would be. It might be the financial worries you thought you never thought you’d have. It might be the diagnosis that makes you feel that your body has betrayed you or the loved one who broke your heart. Maybe it was the rancorous election. None of these things were part of your expected outcome. Maybe it is especially hard after a year of loss and grief
Maybe you, like me, are afraid to hope again, when those hopes have made a fool of you.
All of us know people who have given up on hope, who embrace despair and reject expectation. We have seen how a life without hope is a body without breath, a brittle, fragile husk. If we don’t take the risk of hoping and dreaming, we choose the alternative: A land without hope is a dusty, dry place to pitch our tent.
I never expected the endings and beginnings and the loves and hurts I’d feel. Some of them I’d hand back if I could. Others that I’ve been forced to hold onto have shaped me into a stronger, more resilient person, one who has learned to bend into the hurt instead of breaking against it. Life still won’t be what I expect, but my expectation of myself is surer, wiser. I can stop asking God to give me only what I want, knowing that I will more than survive what I am asked to.
So let’s risk being let down. Let’s dream. Let’s allow hope to make a fool of us again and again. Because it’s worth the chance that it just might surprise us.
And it’s worth the risk to simply live in the well-watered land of hope.
