Expectation vs Anticipation

Welcome to part two!  If you haven't read Anticipation vs Expectation, I highly recommend you start with that.

I long for adventure.  It's a big part of how God created me and I'm just now discovering that in my life.  That it's okay to long for the things God made me to long for.  Ultimately, that longing for adventure is a longing for God who wants to take me on an adventure.  I was thinking of that while on vacation with my hubby and the fact that it's the company, not the setting, that makes the trip.  Going away from the "normal" of our every day lives somehow gives us eyes to see the beautiful, the amazing and the exciting, but it's usually the companionship that makes the whole experience valuable.  If you read last weeks blog you will know I had a list of expectations that I was trying to set aside for, the much preferred, anticipation.  Boy, oh boy, did God test me on that list.

If you haven't guessed already, I got to go to Hawaii for the first time in my life. As much as I talked about expectations last week I found some had settled into my mind without my notice which really polarized my experience.  More than that, God exposed those expectations to me before hand but I failed to anticipate He would challenge them.

Hawaii is a study in contrasts. Million-dollar skyscrapers next door to moldering buildings. Islands renowned for their beauty slowly being overrun by those coming to see it.  Awe and sorrow mixed up together.  I expected to see lush tropical landscapes from quaint bungalows beside the sea....yeah, nope.  I also half expected to get a lei when I got off the plane.  That didn't happen either.  Waikiki is packed full of skyscrapers competing for a view of the ocean.  I get it, its' a tourist destination, what did I expect?  I was very pleased with the hotel we chose, they gave me wine when we walked in the door and they were separate from the hustle of "the strip" which suited us just fine.

The first thing we did in Hawaii was to go to church.  God totally orchestrated this and I can't tell you how grateful I am to God for that.  We arrived too late or too early due to some old information but it wasn't "too" anything because we talked to people and ate with them and just generally felt loved and welcomed to a degree I haven't felt in a very long time at church.  I got to sing in worship with a congregation for the first time in years and I straight up wept for joy.  God started our time in Hawaii by reminding us how seldom we appreciate what is going well.  We take "well" for granted.  You walked up those stairs without tripping, isn't that amazing!  You have food in the house, isn't that spectacular?!  We notice when something is absent, not when it's present.  It was a theme that God gave me practical experience in that week. The church itself was also a school and they had been there for about 100 years.  In the middle of their playground was a huge mango tree that might have been as old.

There was a guest speaker who spoke on American Exceptionalism, an amazing speaker and historian, and I totally recommend you give it a listen, which was kind of a fire hose of information, but totally worth it. 

They gave us lei's!  We also had people talk to us for hours after the service and we didn't want to leave!  They also presented their intention as a church to pray for Muslims for 30 days, especially during Ramadan, and had booklets to help guild you through it.  I'm totally committing to this, more on that later, because we have friends who celebrate Ramadan and I love them and want them to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus.  All in all it was amazing and I can't express how much we loved this place.

I don't even remember what else we did that day because we knew nothing would top church.  Oh yeah, we did an escape room...it did not exceed the fun of church.  


I had three days on my own and I expected that I was going to sit on the beach, fully sun-blocked, and catch up on my Bible Studies and have a totally deep time with the Lord as I soaked in the beauty of His creation.  That kind of happened.  Mostly I got sand in my Bible Studies while I watched the ocean and the few people brave enough to join me on the partly cloudy, windy, cool beach.  I thought the weather was perfect.    We were watching the news carefully about the earthquake and increased activity in the volcano and the new vents.  We had made arrangements to visit the Big Island of Hawaii during our trip and wondered about safety while we prayed for the safety of the families directly affected.  Some of what God showed me during this time needs to be fleshed out in blog posts later on, so you all get to enjoy Hawaii with me for a while longer.

I have to admit that up to this point Hawaii felt very...normal.  The city feel of Waikiki could have been anywhere.  The sharp contrast in the poverty level between streets could have been any inner city.  Other than a beach, which I could walk too, I wasn't seeing the lush tropical forest I expected.  Even though I thought I had set my expectations aside, I had kept some unawares.  I'm from a very dry state.  Water is a novelty to me.  Green is a miraculous color.  While the ocean was lovely, and the green beautiful, it didn't feel amazing.  I expected...I anticipated, amazing.

Had I trained myself to see amazing in my every day to the point where I was unable to recognize the miraculously lovely?  Had I desensitized myself to adventure by seeking it in every circumstance?

Nope.

I was failing to see that the very list of expectations I had exposed last week were being challenged.  Looking back over that list I can see that God made sure every one of those expectations were broken in one way or another so I had a chance to see what I would do.  I had been practicing seeing disappointment and hardship as an exciting adventure at home but it's a totally different animal when you are not at home.  Why is that?  Why do we expect things to be different when we're away?  We are the same and we go wherever we are.  How often are our disappointments based on the belief that things should be different?

There were plenty of disappointments on the trip.  I expected to see a volcano.  I expected to be awed by unfamiliar beauty.  I expected to stay healthy.  As in most things in life, all of those expectations are a little more complicated than the few words I boiled them down too.  I was disappointed, not in the trip, but in myself for struggling to have a good attitude.  I was living as if I expected vacation meant it would be effortless.  That it would come without struggle.  That I would rest from all the "good work" I had done in enlightening myself with God's wisdom.  Yeah, God disillusioned me of that pretty quickly on vacation.  You don't own the lessons God has taught you until the test.  How insufferable would I have been if I had walked serenely through my amazingly perfect vacation, I shudder to think.

The day before we left, as I was walking to the third location on the airport complex looking for my glasses case that had my boarding pass for the airplane of what could not even be charitably called a "comedy" of errors, God reminded me to thank Him.  To thank Him for the errors, the mistakes, the fumbles and the hardships.  He reminded me to thank Him for all the things that were going right in that moment of frustration.  Praise the Lord, He took a "failure" of a day and helped me put on joy.  He redeemed my day not with what I expected  but with what He anticipated.  I almost missed out on wonder.  I almost lost the adventure.  I forgot for a moment that adventure almost always comes from the unexpected.
 

Because sometimes adventure is no toilet paper, swollen ankles, sunburns, lost important items, travel hiccups, lost cars, lost CC scares and wasted money but it's also my hubby tracking down ice, seeing lava, exploring sights we wouldn't have seen, finding the CC at a restaurant after a whole day, someone at church on mother's day asking me if it was okay to wish me a happy mothers day even though he didn't know me or my situation and delighting in what's going well even when not everything is.

Because no matter where you are, God is there with you and He delights in us delighting in Him!

Linkups: