THE LAST RIVER MILE

On 06.08.26 I posted about living in expectancy. After further thought and conversation (thanks to those involved in this) I feel I need to expand on this some. I want to bear down more on the difference between expectation and expectancy. As I see it, they are not the same.

In practice, when we are expectant we are in hopes of a particular outcome. Expectant fans anticipate their team winning. Expectant parents wait for the birth of a new life. Expectant voters want their candidate to win. (Today is a voting day, by the way. Get out and do it!) It’s important in so many circumstances to have expectation. In expectation, though, we are the architects of the desired hope. We have designed the blueprint for what needs to take place, and it’s up to us, to others, to fate, to God, to whatever combination to make this expectation a reality. For those of us who are people of faith, this can mean that we write the script, and then it’s God’s job to read the lines correctly and to follow the stage directions, all to the desired conclusion. At its worst, we can end up calling the expectation shots on who is “right”, who is wrong, who is “in”, who doesn’t belong, who God favors, and who is not worth it. In the practice of expectation, we’re in the driver’s seat.

A climate of expectancy is something different, in my experience and observation. It is both an openness to and a hopefulness for a future that we do not determine. It is a willingness to be joyfully surprised by something we do not create or dictate. For Jesus-followers, it’s being open to whatever outcome the Holy Spirit generates. And it’s about seeking to welcome and join in that thing which we don’t engineer by our efforts, desires, and preferences.

Expectancy is risky, because ultimately we relinquish our addiction to control. We yield to a God who is unbounded by time, space, circumstances, human thought, and all the things we assume bind everyone and everything. We welcome a unique Person who is both with God from before existence (see John 17:5) and one of us at the same time – something we can neither create nor fully understand. We fling ourselves into a Holy Spirit who is as uncontrollable and uncontainable as the wind. All that is taking a huge chance. Yet for centuries, through the fierce ebbs and flows of human history, people somehow hunger for this expectancy.

So where in your life are you understandably expectant, and where are you risking expectancy?

I’ll see you around the next bend in the river.