Two words – responsibility and expectation. Before our words become nouns, they were first God’s words, nouns with movement and experience buried inside them: the ability to respond and expect.
- God’s words are alive and dynamic – full of life and possibility; ours are dead, full of law and fear and judgment. That is why we won’t find the word responsibility in the Scriptures.”
Religion must use law to empower itself and control the people needed in order to survive.
- God gives you an ability to respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in every situation, and therefore each moment is different and unique and wonderful.
- Because God is your ability to respond, He has to be present in you. If God simply gave you a responsibility, He would not have to be with you at all. It would now be a task to perform an obligation to be met, something to fail.
Let’s use the example of friendship and how removing the element of life from a noun can drastically alter a relationship.
- As friends there is an expectancy that exists within our relationship. When we see each other or are apart, there is an expectancy of being together, of laughing and talking. That expectancy has no concrete definition; it is alive and dynamic and everything that emerges from our being together is a unique gift shared by no one else.
- But what happens if I change that expectancy to an expectation – spoken or unspoken? Suddenly, law has entered into our relationship. You are now expected to perform in a way that meets my expectations. Our living friendship rapidly deteriorates into a dead thing with rules and requirements. It is no longer about you and me, but about what friends are supposed to do, or the responsibilities of a good friend.”
Responsibilities and expectations are the basis of guilt and shame and judgment, and they provide the essential framework that promotes performance as the basis for identity and value. You know well what it is like not to live up to someone’s expectation.
- God has never laced an expectation on you or anyone else. The idea behind expectations requires that someone does not know the future or outcome and is trying to control behavior to get the desired result.
- Humans try to control behavior largely through expectations. God knows us and everything about us. Why would God have an expectation other than what He already knows? That would be foolish. And beyond that, because God has no expectations, we never disappoint Him.
Resource: Recenter
to center again; to restore to the center
What God has is a constant and living expectancy in our relationship, and He gives us an ability to respond to any situation and circumstance in which we find ourselves.
- To the degree that we resort to expectations and responsibilities, we neither know me nor trust God.
- To that degree we will live in fear.
God doesn’t just want a piece of you and a piece of your life. Even if you were able, which you are not, to give Him the biggest piece, that is not what He wants. He wants all of us and all of every part of us and you day.
- Jesus doesn’t want to be first among a list of values; He wants to be at the center of everything.
- When Jesus lives in us, then together we can live through everything that happens to you.
- Rather than the top of a pyramid, Jesus wants to be the center, where everything in our life – our friends, family, occupation, thoughts, activities – is connected to Him but moves with the wind, in and out and back and forth, in an incredible dance of being.
craving and resource from “The Shack” by WM. Paul Young
