Several years ago my mentor said these compelling words to me:

“Susie, there’s a big difference between expectation and expectancy. Expectation is premeditated disappointment, where as expectancy involves faith. To cling to your expectation is to decide ahead of time how things need to turn out for you to be okay. To embrace expectancy is to engage your faith that God will move on your prayers and that He may come through in a way that’s different than you expect.”

Wow, wise words, wouldn’t you say?

I don’t know what kind of year you’ve had but for me, it’s been a bittersweet one. On one hand we’ve seen God move in ways that have completely inspired our faith, and on the other hand, we’ve experienced loss and heartbreak in ways that have left me breathless.

Can you relate?

What are we to do with the very real sense of loss, disappointment, and heartbreak we encounter along life’s way? How do we keep our disappointments from tangling us up, from strangling our joy and skewing our perspective?

The answer (as far as I can tell) is this:

To release expectation

To embrace expectancy

It’s time to open our clenched fists and release the crinkled picture of how we thought things would look by now. It’s time to hand it over to the One who knows us best and loves us most. God has a bigger canvas and a far bigger brush. He can paint something beautiful with our lives and with our story that we can’t even comprehend right now. We need to give Him time and space to work in, through, and around us. It’s time to release our puny, detailed expectation of what we think our lives should look like.

And, it’s time to pick up expectancy, to wrap our arms around the fact that Jesus is alive and active in our lives. He moves on faith.

Fear doesn’t motivate Him. Faith does. As we embrace His love and trust His promise to hear our prayers and respond to our faith, we can know, that any day now, Jesus will break through in ways that surprise us.

We’re never out of His care, never out of His reach. He is the God of breakthroughs and He loves to break through when the time is right. Embrace expectancy. Tell yourself that any day now, you’ll see glimpses of glory and evidences of His activity in your life. Because it’s true; right now, He’s moving on your behalf.

Look up. Seek Him. You’ll find Him. He’s got you.

I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire.
He set my feet on solid ground
and steadied me as I walked along. He has given me a new song to sing, a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see what he has done and be amazed.
They will put their trust in the Lord. Psalm 40:1-3

Image: Flickr