31 Ways to Live in Peace, Day 4

Before October even started, I was working to set your expectations.  From experience, I've learned that so much of what we get out of life is determined by our expectations.  I wanted you to expect that I would do my very best to post everyday, but that they would be short and to the point.

If, on the other hand, I had said, Expect that you will read beautifully written posts with tons of meaty content of smoothly flowing paragraphs...expect your life to be profoundly changed just by reading, your experience here would have been much different.  You would have been disappointed and maybe upset that you'd wasted your time.

In addition to the written content, I set your expectations to "be wowed by the foliage in New England"in photos.  It turns out, right now there is no foliage here in CT.  Which leads us to #4:

Manage Your Expectations

Shaun and I speak often of expectations and how they affect so much of life.  Expectations of blog posts or movies, or work or vacations or something as significant as marriage.  As it relates to relationships, we often are looking to have all our needs met by someone else (often our significant other).

Marriage does satisfy many of our needs, but it does so partially and imperfectly...humanly.  At some point, and maybe regularly, our spouse will always let us down.

Is it wrong to look for personal fulfillment in our spouse?  No.  The problem is that, when we expect our marriage partner to meet all our needs, we are seeking fulfillment in the wrong place.  No human can possibly meet all our needs...only God can.

Robin Phillips in Generous Love quoted the bishop who officiated the service for Prince William and Kate.  "As the reality of God has faded from so many lives in the West, there has been a corresponding inflation of expectations that personal relations alone will supply meaning and happiness in life."  This, the bishop said, "is to load our partner with too great a burden."

So true.

Again, quoting the Bishop of London’s marriage homily: “Faithful and committed relationships offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves...In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.”

When we have realistic, God-centered expectations, we can have peace in our hearts and peace in our homes.