Living With Holy Expectation: Part 2

For those of you who read my blog regularly, you know that I am not one for serial posts. I most always keep my blogs independent in content, not too long, just enough to get my message across. I usually stay away from “Part 1 and Part 2 and…” because doing so implies a complexity in the living of a “simply sacred” life. It seems to me that the very idea of simplicity is at odds with multi-step programs about the “how to’s” of life. And yet, there are times when I think it’s justified, this easing onto the stepping stones into the river of something new, something wondrous, something sacred.

Last week, we looked at a few of the many people who entered into Jesus’ world, seeking the unexpected, expecting the holy. We looked at how they ran after Jesus with a determination and a focus that crashed into Jesus’ ministry, that broke into their tired hopelessness and revealed the light of Jesus’ love - the love that healed their wounds, that returned them to health and life. This week, we look at holy expectation from a different angle - for something as wondrous and amazing as the miraculous in our lives is not as easily gotten as learning a 2 or 3 step formula. If there’s nothing else we come away with after our discussion of holy expectation is that there is no formula, no 3 step-program to success, no sure-fire method to getting your miracle, getting your breakthrough. If that’s what you’re looking for, you won’t find it here; and I can promise you - you won't find it anywhere. That’s not how God works.

God’s very creation screams out His great love for diversity, for not doing the same thing twice, for the beauty of difference, of uniqueness, of the special. Just think a moment about snowflakes, and fingerprints and stars: no two the same over millions of years. And yet- God is the same - the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. He is constant. He does not change. So we should not be surprised when we come to realize that God will not treat any two of us the same; in fact we would do well to embrace that notion and come to expect the unexpected from God. It’s Who He is.

Holy expectation is fostered within each of us in a way that is unique to who we are. It won’t look the same for you as it does for me. For some, the blossoming of living in holy expectation occurs in the innocence of youth, while others require the refining fires of experience and aging to usher in that season of grace. And although it looks different for all of us, there is a place where we all must start - a place where we must be willing to begin this journey, a few basic ideas to get us started:

-Shed the notion that God works within an expected paradigm. God’s mercy and grace is wild, creative and so filled with love that its very nature is outside of our understanding. Holy expectation is allowing for God to work in your life differently from what He did for your friend, for the person at church, for anyone we’ve read about in the Bible. God’s ways are never the same for any of us. He breaks into each of our lives, and tears into our realities in a way that is unique and special to each of us - but we’ll miss it if we aren’t tuned-in to the possibilities.

- Holy expectation is about opening up our eyes to the quotidian miracles; those miracles that happen each and every day, even (and especially) in the very midst of life’s messiness. It is living with the sure reality that we exist in the midst of miracles every day, all day: the earth rotating on its axis in its precise march around the sun, not deviating the slightest degree to north or south, east or west; the snowdrop that peeps through late winter’s snow, a bird carefully building its nest in the same place every spring; the beauty of a simple seashell’s alabaster interior, the wrinkled map of Grandma’s beautiful face filled with love. We must practice holy expectation and fine-tune our minds and hearts to see beyond the reality of our small life into the supernatural reality of God that exists in the very air we breathe, in every creature and rock and tree around us. Consciously looking for the miraculous in the every day will develop your posture of holy expectation until you will see miracles around you every day, all day.

-Miracles are not always about the “big event”. Healing of cancers and miraculous checks in the mail can happen; they still do! But if that’s all we’re looking for, we’ll miss many of our miracles. Perhaps your friend’s cancer wasn’t healed, but what about her miracle of the reconciliation with an estranged son before she died? Maybe you haven’t won the lottery or gotten an unexpected inheritance from Great-Uncle Joe, but what about the miracle of having been spared a lay-off in your company that is down-sizing? Maybe you have lost a spouse or a beloved parent to death, but what about the miracle that God has worked in your heart as your grief has opened up new wells of compassion within you? A miracle is a holy breakthrough of God into our everyday life, and holy expectation is living with the knowledge that God will do just that: break into your every day life with something new, special, wondrous - just for you.

-Holy expectation is being willing to let God be God; it’s about the letting go of the need to understand everything, and accept that we don’t know much of anything at all. Holy expectation is about being able to hold the paradox of life in sacred tension, not needing to reconcile every discordant event, every disappointment, every loss; consciously holding good and evil in equal tension in our hands, knowing that all is within the gentle grasp of an amazingly loving God. God can handle the paradox of life even if we can’t.

And when we live this way? With this expectation of holiness all around? That is precisely when we will see the bigger miracles. When we “practice” being open to the miraculous, we won’t miss the “big events” when they come. When we expect God to break into our lives to do the unexpected, we will experience just that - the unexpected, the holy, the miraculous.

It truly is that simple - and that wondrous.