Trust part III and Expectations

Good morning everyone,

Yesterday I talked about trust and nurturing. Today, I'd like to continue on this line of thinking and add another little word in there. Expectations.......just one word with multitudes of issues attached to it. We automatically have expectations. A lot of them are justified. I know that I have an expectation that the sun will rise each morning in the east.....and my expectation was met.

There is a difference between trust and expectations. Let's look at the similarities. I can use trust in the same sentence I used previously about the sun rising. I have trust that the sun will rise each morning in the east. It's always been that way so it's kind of easy to trust that. It's also a reasonable expectation.

Sometimes we develop expectations of those people we trust. That's where things tend to go wrong.  Let's say you trust that your child will tell you the truth when asked if he made his bed. After all, it's easy to check. Therefore, when your child tells you yes, he made his bed, you have an expectation of seeing his bed all made up. Sounds reasonable, right?

What about those times when trust and expectations cross paths instead of being aligned? What if we trust something and we don't have our expectations met? I believe this happens a lot in the work place. A work boss trusts that you will do your job to the best of your ability. The job expectations are explained to you and you sign a paper that says you can meet those expectations. It's kind of like a job description. When we don't meet that expectation, the work boss is disappointed and we may find ourselves out of a job.

I believe that trust and expectations mostly become a problem in relationships. As women, I think we believe that our spouses automatically should know and understand our needs and when they don't, we are upset because our expectation of our mate was not met. We may trust them, but we have set up an expectation that is not reasonable for that mate to meet. Men are kind of the same way. A lot of men think that if something is wrong, the spouse will tell them so they can fix it. When we (as women) become frustrated by their lack of automatically knowing what our need is, then the men become frustrated that we are making a big deal out of something they didn't even know was happening. All of this can be summed up into three little words.......lack of communication. Women don't like to tell men their problems because the men want to fix them. The woman wants to analyze them.

There is so much more to trust and expectations that I more than likely will spend some more time as I've barely scratched the surface. Until next time, take care of each other and be good to yourself. Read God's Word and things will improve, I promise.  Love, Patty