On Expectation and Change: Some Thoughts on My Birthday

I’m lying on a couch as I type these words, my thumbs on the screen. In an hour or two, I’ll be watching the little kids I watch day to day. It rained last night, which is nice, and the Utah mountains and the fresh breeze are invigorating. I went to a movie last night with two of my best friends. We ate some local food and laughed a lot.

This is not how I thought life would be at twenty-nine.

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I’m supposed to have a house; instead, I have two slips of paper that say I know things.

I’m supposed to have a full-time job with benefits; instead, I pay out of pocket for most expenses and have a constant thrum of nervous energy beneath my surface—“Will my dreams be realized or will I, like so many literary and scholarly people before me, die in a ditch somewhere, society and culture forgetting me?”

I’m supposed to have a wife—that will never happen.

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Life does this weird thing of continuing to keep living. Time moves forward, the gears of society grind, and you are swept up by the current and swim against the riptide, trying to do things, but failing—and succeeding as well.

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Expectation seems like a sin to me now.

“I expect to do this at this time.” “My five-year plan has me getting x, y, and z.” “Jesus will definitely come in my lifetime.”

You won’t do that at that time. Your five-year plan will get derailed, even if you get x, y, and z, or if you get a, b, and c and they’re better. Jesus will probably not come in your lifetime. 

Christian scriptures teach us not to expect—or at least not to be expectant.

“But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” (Matthew 24:36).

The difference of verb is slight but important. To not expect would mean to not hope for and have faith in things occurring in the future—that would not be a good place to be in. To not be expectant means to not live life in a way that is always expecting a future something to occur—the destination over the journey.

Instead, the scriptures say to prepare, to live, really, knowing something will happen, but not worrying about when or how or what. Or, even better, to live in a way that you do not worry by being right with God.

According to that hermeneutic, we are not to be expectant of things, privileged in considering certain things will come to us or that life will go a certain way, but rather we are meant to live in or by expectation, our lives tailored to live the morals and ethics we believe God wants us to live—whether or not something happens or is going to happen as we think it is.

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“God is change,” writes Octavia Butler in her Parables duology. God is change is the motto of Butler’s in-text religion Earthseed, a religion birthed out of climactic catastrophe, political upheaval, and personal sorrow.

The concept God is change means that we are always open to change occurring, we do not set ourselves in stone. We see a world around us that is in constant flux. Instead of fearing that flux or standing firm amidst the moving stream, we go with the flow, we recognize that things change, that as humans we change, that as a society we will always be changing. It’s a beautiful concept, one that approaches heights of existence and theology because it reflects God and humanity, since both change.

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Expectation and change—the two constants in life. We expect things, things change, we expect different things, we change. For better, for worse, for the same,

forever.