Tuesday, May 22, 2007

The Higher Your Expectations, The Worse the Outcome


An interesting topic came up in last night’s post, and in another earlier post: that when you raise your expectations about a certain event, truly count on any event to be something special, it never goes as planned. In fact, the higher your expectations, the lower the expectations.

I always thought this was a part of Murphy’s Law, that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. That of course is a ridiculous notion, many things could go worse than they do. But there really is a principle here which applies to the situation: that pushing your will over God’s will never works out.

Now, I don’t consider myself a holy roller or anything, in fact I’m not very religious at all. But I have learned through my program that when I do God’s will, things go as they should, and I can live with the outcome. Sometimes I might wish things turned out differently, but there are no accidents in God’s world, and I find the results are acceptable.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard to know God’s will, but normally I can figure out what God wants me to do with any given situation. At the very least, it’s normally fairly easy to figure out what isn’t God’s will. And if I listen to the people around me, the people who are living a fairly spiritual life, God’s will normally becomes pretty clear to me.

When our hopes are high, and we have major expectations for a given situation, we really mean that we taking back our will. We are putting our goals for a situation above God’s intended result of a situation, and that never works out. Let’s face it, that is a game we will never win; events will always end the way they are meant to end, and we can not change that outcome, however hard we try.

This latest incident was a perfect example of ignoring God’s will and choosing my own will. When my earlier attempts at a date failed, I should have realized the message that was being sent, but I wanted my own will, my own outcome, to be fulfilled. It is no surprise, then, that when the date finally did occur, the outcome was not as I would have liked.

The crazy thing is that perhaps I was meant to keep trying and eventually have the failed date, in order to learn a somewhat painful lesson. Perhaps that was God’s will too. And I can live with that, because accepting God’s will is an important step towards happiness.

Tomorrow will be another opportunity to follow that will. I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn from this situation, and to move forward.

Posted by Scottage at 12:56 AM / | |