The Power of Expectation.

So, I haven't mentioned this before (I don't think), but I'm part of this awesome band/ministry called Shalom. Joined them earlier this year - they've been going for a few years now. Essentially, they needed a new keyboardist, and the drummer and the bassist (both of whom I knew from my church) thought of me first. Which is cool. We basically go round to churches and events and play our songs, bless people with our music. Pretty awesome.

This morning, we had a gig at a church that was having an anniversary. So, lots of food, which was cool. But that's not what I'm writing about!
The pastor there was finishing up a series called "Expecting God to be God". It was about....you guessed it....expecting God to be God. Haha. It was really good, and there were some great things that spoke to me quite specifically.
Fast forward then to this evening, when I was doing the sound desk at my church. We were gathered together for prayer before the music team started practice, and Paul (worship pastor at our church), was talking about how Ryan (youth pastor) had been talking about expectation at some point, and was wondering about what we expected when we came to the service. More expectation....
Then the communion talked about expectation! We have a quick five-minute talk before communion, where people are pretty free to choose what they want to talk about - we've had everything from readings straight from the Bible, to people using medical ideas as metaphors, to people bringing up props to use. All relating back in to communion, of course. And this time, he was talking about the expectation leading up to Christmas - and then linking that back to communion and the lead-up to Jesus' death.
I think that Ryan may have actually mentioned it in his talk as well, but I'm actually not sure now....Paul may have just mixed the two talks up. Possible.

Anyway. Expectation was a bit of a recurring topic, as you can see.

For me, I've always been a person who tries not to have expectations. Particularly of people. Because I've found that people are fallible, funnily enough. So I don't set expectations. I have hopes - which can often be ludicrously high, I'm that sort of person - but I don't really have much in terms of expectations, I don't think. But I think God is really challenging me to not apply that over to him as well. Because people might be fallible, but he's not. And so he doesn't want me to just hope in him. He wants me to trust in him; have faith in him; expect him. Expect that he's going to do something, expect that he's going to come good on his promises, expect that he's going to be there for me. And act on that. Not just wait around, expecting him to do everything for me. That's just silly. But expecting that he's going to be active in my life - and wanting to be active in his as well, I think. That's important.

So yeah, just wanted to share that with you folks. Just a quick aside - I've been on an unofficial part-hiatus for much of this year. That's now done, so I'll probably be posting somewhat more regularly/frequently now. More the latter, at a guess. But yeah :)