Unmet Expectations Podcast Episodes

Welcome to Breaking Bread, a podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Today I’ve got with me, Arlan Miller. Welcome to the show, Arlan. It’s good to be here. We’re going to talk about a very pertinent topic today, Arlan. And one that I think our listeners will identify with. To set the stage and before I give way to that topic, I’d like to just recall the well-known story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. So, if we recall that story, this is right after Christ’s death. We have Cleopas and his friend walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus, which is you know, some seven-mile journey, a couple hour stroll, and they are just dejected and despondent about what has taken place during Passover. They expected Jesus to be something that he didn’t materialize on. And we have phraseology there that says, but we trusted in him. And he was a prophet, mighty in deed, and he was supposed to redeem Israel. You get a sense that as they walked this road, they had expectations that were not met. 

Arlan, what are we going to talk about today? That’s exactly what we are going to talk about. They had built up a picture of what was supposed to happen in their minds, and it wasn’t a wrong picture, it wasn’t a bad picture. It was a picture where they had envisioned a scenario that just did not develop. 

And often we’ll find that in our life we can have that same type of situation. We have a vision or a picture of what is supposed to happen. This job promotion is supposed to come through. This marriage proposal is supposed to go the way that I want it to go. Our family is supposed to develop, we’re supposed to have kids at a certain time or so on and so forth. 

And then for whatever reason, nobody’s fault, nothing wrong, but for whatever reason, those expectations do not materialize. And in the case of Cleopas and his friend, it was intertwined in their faith. Here they had faith in Christ. I mean, isn’t that exactly what we’re supposed to have? And even in the examples that you cited, a lot of times those things are cradled in faith and yet it doesn’t happen. There’s a redirection, there’s a change. There’s something that does not materialize.  

Now, Arlan, can we also think about it on a much more local scale than those deep and heavy things? Right. I am thinking of going to Disney World. Oh, my goodness. We save up for this and we’re going to have a great time. And if we don’t have a great time, and if this doesn’t work out and if we don’t have these passes or whatever it is, you know, I’m just thinking of my kids’ expectations. We definitely have to manage expectations. Yes. And then the kids are sick for the first three days or it rains or it’s cold or something.  

And expectations do not materialize the way we think they should. And it can be a huge gap between expectations and reality and managing that gap is a critical skill that we often overlook. I’ve heard the phrase to expect little and be disappointed little, and there’s a lot of truth to that. 

There’s a connection between our expectations and our disappointment level, so to speak. Very much so. So next time you’re going on vacation, just prep the kids. We’re going to have an awful time. We’re just not going to have a good time at all. We’ll just be away for about a week or so. 

That’s exactly right. It’s going to rain their whole camping trip. It’s going to rain and we’re going to be stuck in the tent together. Just expect that. Exactly. Right. What do we want to accomplish with this podcast, Arlan? What do we want to help our listeners with? Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that we’d like to really accomplish. A couple of purposes.  

Number one, I think we want to acknowledge that this exists, that there is such a thing as unmet expectations, that it’s normal, that it’s real, that most of us at some point in our life will go through such a situation. That’s a huge thing to understand and to appreciate that what I’m experiencing has been experienced and will be experienced from the Bible times on to now and in the future. And I think the second thing that we would like to accomplish is just some practical ways to think through those scenarios to frame up your world, so to speak, so that you have the proper lens to view these times and to interpret these times.  

I think our listeners understand what we mean by unmet expectations. As we have already illustrated in deep and heavy things, but also in things that are more insignificant or light. But it is a type of loss. Right. And what do we mean by a loss? And how is an unmet expectation a loss? Unmet expectations are a type of loss. The technical term is ambiguous loss. A loss that is hard to define, or a loss that’s brought on by the absence of something. It is a fact that you are feeling loss for what didn’t happen, as opposed to what we usually think of when you feel loss for something that did happen. So, let’s set that next to a non-ambiguous loss that could be the loss of a child or of a spouse. 

It’s very clear in that sense that a person has experienced a loss, and we rally around those people in those situations, and so we can easily internalize ourselves that, oh, this is indeed a loss, but an ambiguous loss is a little bit cloudier. And therefore, perhaps it goes under the radar. 

Is that true? Very much so on two different levels. Number one, the individual going through that doesn’t even really understand or realize why they are feeling sad? Why am I grieving? Why am I experiencing some of the same emotions and feelings that I would experience if there was a defined loss in my life? They don’t really feel like this is appropriate to feel this way. Well, let’s put up some examples for our listeners just to flush this out a bit more. So, a couple who is struggling with infertility, right? There’s a huge loss there. There’s a hole there. 

But it’s an ambiguous loss. Or I had hoped for a promotion and that job opening went to somebody else. I struggle with that, but again, I’m not even really sure what that would’ve meant in my life and how that would’ve changed. So, I don’t even know exactly what the loss is. It just didn’t happen. 

Right. Are those, are those good examples? Very much so. Another one that I think is huge to recognize or very large to recognize is around the area of marriage. Maybe you have not gotten married, even though that’s been a godly desire of your heart for a period of time, or you’ve pursued marriage, and it did not work out in your favor. 

Those are both areas where you are grieving what did not happen. You are grieving the whole of something that you had expected to emerge and did not emerge. Frequently, I think, we would say that loss gives rise to grief. And if we’re defining this as a loss, we are saying that it’s okay to grieve and there is a grieving that is necessary for unmet expectations. 

Is that fair to say? Very much so. That is a very important piece to realize. What does grief look like then? With an unmet expectation situation, often grief will take a lot of the same forms that you would see in a typical grieving situation. There’ll be a period of anger. There’ll be a period of protesting against what did not happen in this case that can turn into despair or detachment if allowed to continue on. 

And ultimately, hopefully, if that grieving process goes to its proper end, there will be a sense of acceptance. Which I know will be an area that we’ll continue to talk about. You know, and Matt, one of the things that makes this situation so difficult is that this type of grief is often associated with what we would call disenfranchised grief. 

Disenfranchised grief is different than most situations in the sense that many people will not understand why you are grieving or what you are going through? It’s not a publicly recognized thing. No one perhaps knows except for maybe your closest friends that you suffered through a miscarriage or that you’re struggling with infertility. 

Or that you were passed over for the job promotion or that the marriage proposal did not go the way that you had hoped it would go. A lot of these grief type situations continue on in silence to the outside world, and that can be extremely hard. Which sets it apart from those previously mentioned losses, which are very open, very public, very obvious to everybody because part of grieving is that support that we get from others who know that we are grieving.  

But these are for unobvious reasons that we’re grieving. And it seems inappropriate, perhaps to grieve outward in the way that we would grieve for the loss of a child. It would seem inappropriate maybe to, to grieve outward in that sense for infertility for example, because people aren’t putting those pieces together. 

Correct. So that adds a layer of challenge to this, doesn’t it? The body of Christ, through no fault of their own, very likely might not know that there’s a difficult time to rally around. And so, the individuals will find themselves walking through this seemingly alone at times. 

And that’s another whole layer of encouragement that we would like to offer to build up and really encourage the church to be more sensitive, right? To be aware. There seems to be another layer of differences here when it comes to grief with an ambiguous loss. 

In an unambiguous loss where that loss is very clear, whether it be the loss of a child or a loss of a job, where that’s marked in time, it seems like we know when to start to grieve. Is there an element here with an ambiguous loss, these things that didn’t materialize where a part of the grief is. Should I be grieving? Is it time to grieve? Maybe we will have children. Maybe I will still get that promotion. How long will I wait until I realize God said no? Did he say no? Should I start to grieve? Waiting can be one of the most difficult parts of this. The unknown can be an extremely difficult piece, and you don’t have that clarity of a point in time. 

It takes me back to the story that we started with. Cleopas and his friend on this journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus. When did it occur to them that Jesus isn’t going to pull this thing out? At some point in time, this grief settled in on them. And that’s when they started to deal with it. So, as we review upon today, as we talked about unmet expectations and understand them in terms of a loss, a unique type of loss, which gives rise to a unique type of grief provides an understanding for us as we look into our own hearts and we look into the hearts of our congregation. 

And we also think about how we might manage expectations. So, the next time we take the kids to grandma and grandpa’s house, we’re going to say kids, we’re going to grandma and grandpa’s house. We’re going to have an awful time. It’s not going to be any fun at all. So just expect little and maybe set those expectations way low. 

Well, I think Arlan, we’ve got a lot to recover in upcoming podcasts so that we can redeem this topic and we intend to do so in the next episode. We’re going to talk about a larger biblical understanding that might help us in dealing with unmet expectations. 

And so, until then, listeners, thanks for being with us today. Have a great day. 

Welcome back to Breaking Bread, a conversation brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. I am Matt Kaufman, and with me is Arlan Miller. Welcome back Arlan. Thanks, Matt. It’s good to be here. We started a conversation in our first part on unmet expectations. 

We defined them a bit clinically as an ambiguous loss that has grief attached to it, and it’s unique in some of those details. But now Arlan, as I think about unmet expectations going back to that quote that we mentioned, expect little be disappointed little, which we kind of chuckle with. If we are going to solve the unmet expectations in our life, we have one of two options to take. We can either meet the expectation and throw our resources and emphasis towards how to meet our expectations, or we can reconstruct our expectations, and it seems like we’re going to have more traction with the second. Most definitely, Matt. 

And what you find, if you look at the first piece, meets the expectations. I mean, you can get extreme, and you can have almost humorous stories where we’re taking the kids on vacation and we’re going to have fun no matter what, and it’s going to happen, and you’re going to smile and you’re going to laugh at all my jokes and everything’s going to be perfect, you know? 

But the reality is that often the meeting of an expectation is outside of our control. There are many things that will happen every single day that we have no control over. We can’t micromanage that vacation or that interaction or own it. We have to realize that many things happen every day that are outside of our control. 

Okay? So, you’re saying that there is a realization required in order for us to properly understand our unmet expectations or expectations in general, what do we need to realize? What do we want to talk about today, Arlan, that will help us with this realization piece?  

One would be, reorienting yourself to God. Second, understanding the fallen nature of the world and the world that we live in. Then third, having your identity redeemed in Christ, and fourth, resting in the hope of this greater understanding. And as you mentioned in the first podcast, there isn’t really a system or a step to make everything better in our life, right? 

This isn’t a formula. We’re not talking about a formula here, but you are going to suggest here in this conversation that there are four principles whereby we can process unmet expectations or process our expectations. Let’s start with the first, finding meaning in God. What do we mean by this? I think this is when you are spinning in the midst of grief or disappointment or frustration or whatever emotion it might be. One of the most important things that is critical is to settle yourself on the reality of who God is, to ask yourself some of those basic questions. So, who is God? Is he good? Is he in control? Because often you’re going to find that groundwork or that framework or that foundation. Satan is going to want to use that to really make you struggle. 

You’re going to be questioning God. You’re going to be questioning what’s good. You’re going to be questioning whether he really cares and loves you. Arlan, I see this as a natural derivative of unmet expectations. It seems natural for a believer to ask those questions that you’ve just asked. I mean, isn’t that what Job did, for example? 

The unmet expectation led to sometimes shaking our fist at God. And so, can you help us process that? Two different pieces there, Matt. Rarely do you find a character in the Scriptures that had all of his or her expectations met as they had wanted them to, and rarely do you find those characters in the Scriptures who don’t at some point go through this questioning or this doubt as to what is going on here, God?  

Now what is important through that though is that you focus on the reality of what is. You go back to the Scripture and back to the promises of how God defines himself through his Word, and you repeat those, and you remind yourself of those over and over again. You shift your eyes back onto the God of truth and not to the god that you are creating. 

In your mind, God is all knowing. God is love. And those types of things, you allow his attributes to reorient us. And so, now I can understand the principle that you’ve laid out here. Finding meaning in God, drawing my eyes off of myself with my expectation, placing them on God. Let’s move to the second one. 

The second one you said was, understand the fallen state of the world. Why is this understanding so important? I think often this is where the expectation is not met. Things happen. The vacation doesn’t go the way that we thought it would go. The weather is not perfect. It rains all day. The individual that you thought you were being led to marry doesn’t view it the same way as you do. 

Because we live in a fallen world, we can expect expectations not to be met. That’s exactly part of it. Expectations do not naturally take into account the fallen nature of our world. We always have this rosy picture. Okay. Whoa. I think that’s an important principle. You said expectations don’t naturally take into account the fallen nature. 

Rarely do you plan for the worst-case scenario. Rarely do you say, hey, we’re going to have a great Christmas and everybody’s going to get sick. You know, you’re thinking everything is going to be perfect and rosy, and you leave out the factor that bad things happen, right? So, in my expectation, whenever I make an expectation, I typically think everything will work out perfectly. That’s the basic foundation that expectations rest on. And you’re asking us now to take out from underneath us that foundation and realize that’s fantasy. And that really, our expectations rest upon a fallen nature of the world. 

I like it. Okay, so now that’s helping me as I process. And now I’m not surprised that flat tires are a part of the fallen nature in the fallen world. Let’s move on now to this third one. Have your identity redeemed, I think you said. Have our identity redeemed in Christ. Because what you often find out is that we will put our identity, or have our identity redeemed in things happening to us. 

It can be based upon our job, our family, or our children, or some other thing. And the scripture is extremely clear. In Colossians, it says that we are complete in him. We are complete in Christ. We are hidden in him. Okay. It is a critical piece to remind ourselves over and over again, I am complete in you Jesus. 

And without you, I am not complete. Arlan, I think that makes a lot of sense. And let me explain. When we struggle with an unmet expectation, frequently our struggle is our hurt. I am not able to have a child. That hurts. I have been rejected by a marriage proposal. I was not good enough to get a promotion. My children have not become who I envisioned them to become because of my fatherhood. And you find that lens and that picture is very much on ourselves and we are orbiting very closely to who we are and we’re forgetting about the bigger picture and all of those things. Yes. 

Children, yes. Spouse, job, whatever. It’s about us and not about Christ. They evaluate who I am, therefore, the loss and the grief are acute. But you’re suggesting that we have misplaced that evaluation of who we are on something that it should not be on. As believers, it should be on Christ completely and fully on Christ. 

Okay. So, I think that’s an important principle, then in having our identity redeemed. Let’s move on to the last one then. You said rest and hope. I want to be clear here too. That by no means do we try to deny the fact that we are feeling certain ways. You can’t stuff an emotion down and expect it just to disappear.  

But what we are called to do is to take those emotions and those feelings and to redeem them in the greater picture and the greater view of what is truly good. And who God is, and it changes our questions. Often, we ask the question, why did this happen to me? And it changes the question to, well, to what purpose or to what end God, did you have for this? 

I see this as really deeply rooted in faith, Arlan. I don’t know that we can have this perspective without having a deep faith in God and his larger purposes. Most definitely. I heard someone say once that faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse, and I think throughout the Scriptures you see this regularly, early and often You see an example of where God, as he says, has higher ways than ours, so much higher than the heavens are above the earth, as it says in Isaiah 55, and he almost delights to show those higher ways in ways that we could not even begin to comprehend or understand.  

And so, in this fourth one, our rest is this. When we have unmet expectations, it’s important to have this understanding of God and his sovereignty, being able to redeem our expectation because we have to believe his expectations are met. And his expectations are better than ours. Okay. Now this is good stuff, and I can’t help but notice Arlan, and I’d like you to speak about this. Do these four things give hint to the gospel? Oh, most definitely. If you think about the example of the gospel message, where you see redemption take place where God takes something that is broken and unclean and not the way that was intended, and he redeems it to a greater purpose and a greater view. 

And with that just to be encouraged, listeners, we see now that unmet expectations, the salve of unmet expectations is the gospel itself. When we find God and we put our view on God and we understand his larger attributes, we see our fallenness in the fallen state of the world, we find redemption and redefinition in Christ and then come out of that with a renewed hope. This now puts feet on the gospel, and I think that’s a lot of help as we think about moving on from this conversation, I’d like to pick up, Arlan with examples in Scripture. You’ve hinted at a few. I think in our next conversation, let’s start to look at some examples in the Scriptures. 

Let’s see if we can’t trace out and put our finger on this gospel redemption as it plays out with unmet expectations through characters of the Bible. Sounds great, Matt. I look forward to it. Until then. Have a great day. I trust that this conversation has been helpful to you, our listeners. Again, we have resources on our website at accounseling.org. 

We always would like to point to those resources. Goodbye. 

Welcome back to Breaking Bread. I have Arlan Miller with me. And I’m Matt Kaufmann. We’re finishing up the third conversation of three here on unmet expectations. We have talked about what unmet expectations look like in terms of what they are like as a loss and the grief that we have with unmet expectations. In our last conversation we talked about a larger understanding and really how the gospel is the larger understanding by which our unmet expectations should be cradled. And we promised our listeners that we would talk a little bit about where we see this in Scripture? 

Where do we see the men and women of Scripture having their expectations redeemed? Because there’s a great deal of hope, but I’m not quite convinced. Sure. And one of the first examples that comes to my mind is the character of Job. And Job is a fascinating book, and you really almost have to read the whole thing to get the full picture because you have the internal wrestling of a man that for no fault of his own and no wrongdoing on his part went through extremely difficult and troubling times. And in the midst of that, you see that wrestling where he is questioning, well, God, are you there? Are you listening? And then you see him come back on the other side and say, though he slay me, I will trust him, and I know that he’s going to bring me forth as gold. 

And he works through that. And ultimately, the fascinating thing is that God shows up at the end of the story and God doesn’t ever tell him the answer. Why? He never really explains and says, this is the purpose of what was going to happen here. He just says, this is who I am. I am still the same God I was at the beginning. I’m still going to be the same God here. And it says that Job repented and maintained his faith in him. And I think it has a lot of the earmarks that you had mentioned previously about disenfranchised grief. Yes. A lot of the narrative of Job is his friends not getting it right. 

They understand why he’s sad, but they don’t understand the root. And so, he struggled with that fellowship counsel piece. So, I like to look at that example because what it tells me, Matt, is that at times if I’m wrestling and I’m struggling and I’m angry and upset and frustrated, I’m in good company. 

I think sometimes we get this wrong mindset that a good believer is someone who never doubts or never questions God. And that’s not the example we see in Scriptures. You see a good believer is someone who maybe goes through those periods of doubt but then maintains their faith in God on the other end. 

Can we see unmet expectations being a struggle for Mary and Martha with the death of Lazarus? The easiest thing or the most clear thing in their mind was for Jesus to come and to heal their brother. He had done it a million times over. Why won’t you heal my brother? Oh, this is a slam dunk, Lazarus. We’re friends of Jesus. We’ve got his ear, and you almost get a sense of this disenfranchised grief that Mary had. When Jesus finally comes late, she doesn’t even go out to meet him. She sends Martha out and Martha meets him. If you would’ve been here, my brother had not died. 

There’s that big if this, then. My expectation has been unmet. And what they missed throughout the entire thing is the great miracle that Jesus is going to do through Lazarus. Not only will he heal him, but he will also raise him from the dead. And if you go on to look at the bigger purpose there, it says in the next chapter of John that people were believing on Christ because of Lazarus and the testimony that he gave. Often, we miss that big purpose that God has. Now, the message that we’ve previously mentioned about unmet expectations being redeemed is now fleshed out a bit in this example. So, the expectation of Mary and Martha was, come and heal my brother from sickness. The expectation of Jesus was to raise him from the dead. He had a different plan all along. His plan was better and his was met. Very much so.  

Okay. Where else do we see this? Another example that I like to use is the example of David in the temple. David, the king, desires to build a temple to glorify God. A good desire, a godly desire. And in fact, the desire where Nathan, the prophet, came and said, go and do everything that’s in your heart. I think David probably thought this was going to be the jewel of his reign. Very much. This was going to, this was going to be the magnum opus of his tenure as a king. Yeah. And very quickly you see God redirect that dream. 

That to me is a great example of a redirection that sometimes happens as we walk through this life and as we stay open to God and his leading. I think we will often experience those redirections where what we think is a slam dunk or what we think is to be a perfect example maybe is not quite what God had in mind. 

And what I like about that story is that when God comes back and says, no, you’re not going to build the temple. Your son Solomon’s going to build the temple and it’s going to be a glory. David rejoices, he’s thankful, he rejoices, and he says he spends the rest of his life preparing for that to happen. And then God advanced his purposes and his expectations in a different way, but David was able to support that and see and rest in that hope that God was going to do it.  

Let’s look at another example. I think Moses must have struggled with unmet expectations. Here this man leads these folks, these complainers for 40 years through the wilderness. 

And because of a misstep on his part. He gets banished from the land the of Canaan, and we see this struggle that he has with God in no uncertain terms. He’s like God, please. And then God has to say, Moses, I’m done talking about this. You’re not going over. Certainly, this was an unmet expectation. 

And how was it redeemed? What we see here, Matt, with Moses is exactly an example of this, where he was focused on the physical promised land and wanting to go into the land of Canaan and God all along was talking about a spiritual promised land. And we see Moses in heaven later as he comes back on the Mount of Transfiguration. 

And in that example, often our view can be too low. Our gaze can be too shortsighted. You know, as you say that Arlan, it makes me grin at the might of God and his all-knowing power that he perhaps allows our expectation to be unmet so that it can be turned on its head and exceeded. That’s what I see in Moses. That’s what I see in Lazarus. That’s what I see in Job. I see this as a common theme. God puts upside down our expectation for his great purposes. He redeems it to a greater glory than it ever could have been. 

And I think often we get stuck on that question of why, and we get stuck on this vision and this fixation that this is what I wanted and why couldn’t this happen the way that I wanted? And I think God sits back and as only he can do, he reveals that he has such a greater vision ahead of us than we can ever understand. 

And then I think to close here, let’s see it in the dearest story, and that is in Christ Jesus’s life here as we read in Isaiah and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed for he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground. He hath no form nor comeliness that when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. 

We missed Christ because we expected the Messiah to come as a king, certainly not to be born in a stable, and certainly not to be born into unwed parents, right? I mean, it’s almost like you see God toying with our expectation. Yes, that’s exactly right. Matt let’s go back to the original story when we started this entire discussion and the road to Emmaus and Cleopas and those men were looking for a physical messiah that was going to free the Jews from Rome. And what they received, which is so much grander and greater than they could ever have anticipated, was the Savior of the entire world. 

God understands unmet expectations. He weaves it into his plan, doesn’t he? He weaves it into his plan because God is God and only he can do that in the way that he can do that. He understands them. They’re near to his heart. And I think that is an important piece to understand throughout this entire discussion. 

Arlan, I think our listeners have been blessed by the redemption that we see in unmet expectations and that we do struggle with unmet expectations. And when we have an expectation that is not met, that we should perhaps be looking for the larger expectation of God that will be met. And frequently it’s when our expectation is turned on its head, and I think that’s what we see through the Scriptures, and I think that provides a great deal of hope and help to us as believers. Thanks so much for leading us through this conversation Arlan, and to our listeners, again, thank you for being with us and until next time, have a great day.