Expectations

"Always Joyful",

"Engaged in the lives of others",

"Deeply compassionate",

"Awesome",

"If she has, all will have" (ie she shares well),

"Gives thoughtful answers"...

If I could pick a theme of last week it would be words of encouragement. When I cooked my first Biblical feast, who should be there but one of my four beautiful roommates from Taize, who proudly introduced me to all of her missionary in training friends. Then the following Tuesday for 'prayer' time (what exactly qualifies as prayer? - that would be a good topic for a future post) we sat in a circle and had our classmates whisper words of encouragement into our ears.

But for me, the funny thing was that encouragement and expectations go hand in hand. When someone tells you what they admire about you, it often is coupled with who they expect you to be. They hope for a consistent action or way of being on your part. Which leads me to ask, what happens if you can't be that person for them all the time? While I know that some of the phrases above describe me, I also know that I will fail to fully live into all of them. I am going to have bad days and falter.

Part of a group discussion I have been having lately has been about the expectations that burden women, for whenever we "aren't acting right" (ie the way people expect us to act), we are asked 'what's wrong?', not from a place of general concern but instead as a way of being told to snap out of it and act according to what others expect, if not demand, from us. There is not room for a bad day.

So as blessed as I was by what people were saying about me, I was also deeply saddened as I thought about how often I do not live into those phrases and wondering if I was just setting myself up to disappoint them.