I realize we are quickly approaching Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but this year I’ve been unable to stop thinking about Palm Sunday. Believe me, I love the reminder of the resurrection and what Jesus did so that I can be saved, but I’ve not paid a whole lot of attention to Palm Sunday until this year. Maybe it’s because I’m in a strange season of life, trying to determine where or what God is tugging me toward, or maybe it’s because I just needed to see something to shift my perspective a little bit.
Less than a week before Jesus was betrayed, brutally beaten and crucified, He had come into Jerusalem to a grand reception! It isn’t called the “Triumphal Entry” for nothing! He was riding on a borrowed donkey’s colt, and the multitudes came out to greet Him. They laid their cloaks before Him on the road and waived palm branches before Him, shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord” as He rode to the temple. Just think of that sight! Crowds hailing Him as King and publicly acknowledging Him as Messiah. So what in the world happened that caused them to turn on Him so quickly and strongly? How do you go from one extreme to the other in a matter of a few days? The answer really lies in one word: Expectations.
Expectations are interesting things. The dictionary defines “expectation” as a strong belief something will happen or to be the case. Our expectations in life depend on the information we have been given and the way in which we interpret that information. For example, I expect that my husband is going to do the yard work because he said he would do it. I believe he will do it, but I also have my expectations of when it will happen and what it will include. When he does finally go out to do the yard work, he decides not to weed the flowerbeds or sweep off the sidewalk, and I get upset. Why? Because he didn’t do things the way I believed they would be done. 
There may be a good reason why he did things differently, but all I see is my unmet expectations. In my original conversation, all he said was that he was going to take care of the yard. He did not reveal other details of what he planned to do, and I created additional expectations based on the way I would do things. My expectation that the yard work would be done rests on believing what he told me. My expectation of HOW it would be done rests in everything else I assumed from his statement. Our expectations are colored by our past experiences, and they deeply affect our emotions. When we expect something bad to happen and it doesn’t, we get excited and happy. When we expect something good to happen and it doesn’t, we become upset, sad, depressed or even angry. We’ve all experienced the reality of that roller coaster when we interpreted something differently, and suddenly our world is turned upside-down because something unexpected took place.
So back to Palm Sunday, it was a day filled with people who definitely had expectations! Some lived in Jerusalem and some were traveling there for the Passover celebration. They had read the prophesies of old and knew that God was coming to deliver them. They were being oppressed by Roman rule, so when Jesus, their “King,” showed up, they were excited. Deliverance was on the way! They expected Him to ride in and destroy their enemies, deliver them and set up HIS kingdom. They expected to see fire and fight in Him. They expected a political leader. They thought their day had finally come, so they exclaimed His praises as He rode through town. This was a GREAT day for them, but then things started to change quickly. They listened to things He was saying and when His message didn’t fit their expectations, they turned on Him. He said His Kingdom wasn’t of this world (John 18:36). He didn’t argue or even defend Himself when He faced His accusers (Matt 27:12-14). He didn’t answer the charges or even respond to them. By all standards, He appeared weak. He certainly did NOT look like a King about to take over! As a result, it must have confirmed (in the minds of many) that He was not the Messiah, and if He wasn’t the Messiah, then He was definitely a blasphemer as charged. So in a matter of days, the shouts of the crowd went from “Hosanna” to “Crucify!” When given a choice of who to release, they chose to put a convicted thief and murderer back into their community rather than someone who had only done good to others. They were THAT convinced it was impossible He was who He claimed to be, because a King would not come as He came. A King would not just lie down to be slaughtered.
The crowds that shouted Hosanna on Palm Sunday found themselves with serious unmet expectations. The Messiah they longed for and believed in did not show up like they expected Him to, but He did show up, and He did deliver them, and also all of us. They just couldn’t accept God had a plan far greater than their temporary political situation. It was hard to understand after years, or generations, of expecting something different that this could actually be their Messiah, but God was at work on His master plan to change everything for humankind. He was working things out for their good, even when they couldn’t see it or refused to see it.
How many times in our lives have we lived out our own personal “Holy Week?” I have been in difficult situations where I was depending on the many promises of God. I believe He knows and cares about what I’m going through, has the power to deliver me, and is working things out for my good. I have shouted “Hosanna” in my expectations and perceptions of what He has said, but then He starts working things out differently than what I expected. He starts doing or allowing things that I just don’t understand. If we aren’t careful, we watch what’s happening and start to think that maybe He isn’t who we thought He was. We look around and start getting angry that He isn’t doing more “smiting” of our enemies or my circumstances and is instead leaving you or me alone to fight for ourselves. It doesn’t take long for us to think on these things before we end up angry because it seems He doesn’t care enough to take care of us. In our own way, we go from shouting “Hosanna,” to shouting, “Crucify!” We start letting our doubts, or even anger, that arises from unmet expectations to drive our perspective, and we can end up choosing to set free the worst of ourselves rather than to trust God knows what He is doing.
Life is hard. We were never promised that it would be easy. As a matter of fact, we are told repeatedly in the Bible that we will have trials and struggles, but God is always working for our good. It’s just so incredibly hard to accept that as truth when our reality feels so much like the opposite. Yes, God has the ability to come riding into our circumstances, proclaim Himself as King and destroy whatever or whoever is oppressing us, but we can’t see the big picture. Sometimes He is working on a much grander and better plan for our deliverance than we can see. Just because it doesn’t make sense to us, doesn’t mean God isn’t who He says He is, or doing what He said He would do.
There are many beautiful pictures in the Easter story – pictures of grace and mercy, of sacrifice and redemption – but this year my prayer is that we remember the crowds. I pray we remember the way their unmet expectations of HOW God was going to deliver them caused such a drastic change in a matter of days. 
Unmet expectations can cause us to doubt what we know to be true. When we hold so tightly to our version of what our deliverance should look like, or how it should come, we end up spending our lives looking for the next best solution. We waste our energy trying to resolve it ourselves and end up sacrificing our peace and joy in the process. Sometimes our deliverance comes through waiting. Sometimes it comes through struggles. And sometimes we are yelling “Crucify” at the very One who is delivering us – all because He isn’t doing it as we expected.
So look up, my friends, and I will look with you. I will look to the cross and see not only love and redemption, but also a reminder that God is working a master plan for my good. And when it seems like God is doing nothing, He is doing something exceedingly, abundantly above all I could ask or think. I just need to stop shouting my plans at Him and trust in the fulfillment of His own.
Blessings and a very happy Easter to you all!
Fast forward to Christmas in our family this year. My mom is now living with my husband and I, and my Dad is living in a memory care facility. This is our first Christmas on this new journey, and it has brought many logistical and emotional changes. I’ve awakened at my parents’ house for Christmas my entire life. Even as adults, we spent the night with them. This year, I woke up for the first time in my own home, the one Mom now shares with us. It felt strange not packing up on Christmas Eve to go to my parents’ house for the night, and I knew my Christmas morning would feel different too. Mom, for the past 30 years or so, woke us all up at 5:00 a.m. by loudly playing The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole. It’s impossible for me to hear the opening of that song without memories of those mornings flooding my mind. Our traditions have now been changed not by choice, but by our circumstances.
So, this year, in the midst of the glaring changes to the early part of my Christmas morning, I decided to do something different. I thought about my 5-year old mother and took a light blue sock, filled it with a little toy, a few pieces of candy, and yes, a Heath bar. I taped it very quietly to the door of my mom’s room and started playing The Christmas Song on my phone that I had laid against her doorway. As I stood hiding in the morning darkness, listening for the sound of Mom taking that sock off the door, I couldn’t help but think about how there are always opportunities for creating beautiful moments, no matter if they’ve been going on for generations, or whether it’s the very first time it’s happened. I peeked around the corner of my mom’s room and said, “Merry Christmas.” There sat my mom on the edge of her bed, laughing and crying at the same time. So, we sat on the bed together in the faint glow of daybreak, reminiscing about her childhood, “Pop,” our family, and how anything can be redeemed, even if it takes 70 years. It was my greatest gift this year.
As we continue through a season that is supposed to be filled with joy and love, I look around and see stress and frustration on the faces of people around me. Drivers are out of control with anger; shoppers are pushing and shoving each other; some people are going into debt trying to meet their (or others’) expectations of gift-giving. There are also some who are living with great losses and challenges that cause all the standard holiday activities to simply disappear into the background. In a season that is so often labeled as “magical,” it becomes easy to feel everything but a sense of wonder. Busyness and activity has a way of doing that before we even realize it.
Dementia has a way of turning everything upside down. One of the things I love about Teepa Snow, and her organization (
Dealing with someone who has dementia has brought so many lessons for dealing with life in general. When someone has dementia, you have to meet them where they are in order to develop and maintain a relationship with them. My dad isn’t who he used to be, and yet he is still exactly who he always was. I just have to find those things that he can still do and live in that place with him. This relationship is not exactly as I wished or hoped it would be at this stage in both our lives, but it can still be something amazing. Embracing, celebrating and being thankful for all he can still do, allows me to be open to riding this roller coaster with him instead of watching him ride alone. It allows me to live life with him now, in this moment, instead of continually seeing nothing but what has faded into the fabric of our journey. If we want to fully live, we must live in the NOW.
So as we celebrate this Christmas that is upon us, let us first remember the greatest gift God gave us by coming to earth to sacrifice Himself so we can have eternal life. But let us also remember He didn’t have much from a material standpoint, but He always worked with what He had. When He called others to join Him, He worked with what they had and compelled them to do the same. Let us celebrate not just the life of Christ, but the life He wants for each of us. He’s gifted every single one of us with abilities, even when we feel we don’t have anything on which we can build. Stop for a moment. Look within and stop focusing on what you’ve lost or wish you had. Look deeply and start recognizing all you still have, every single thing you have or are able to do is a gift. No matter your circumstances or what you might see as your deficiencies, you have way more “gifts” than you can imagine.
I’ve thought a lot this week about hoping and wishing for things. There was a situation in my personal life that looked like it was going to work out better than we had expected, but then it just didn’t pan out the way we had hoped or wished. It seems to be the way of life for us, and you’d think we would learn to not expect anything at all. After all, it would be easier to not hope for anything and be pleasantly surprised, than it would be to think something is going to work out and have it fall through. Does this sound like days, weeks, or even years you have experienced in your own life? When I consider the possibility of abandoning hope or expectations that things will work out, it flies in the face of what I have believed. I’ve always believed God is working everything out for my ultimate good, but what happens when you feel let down over and over until you stop asking for things?
When my situation came up this past week, it looked like God was doing something above and beyond for us, but then it didn’t happen. Do you know what that made me think? I started thinking “here we go again; God must be disappointed in us to dangle this out there and then yank it away.” I was totally disappointed in God and it temporarily undermined my trust in Him. Yep, my so‑called faith took a tumble into the abyss for a little while. But why? Because my perspective was out of whack on two points:
Gratitude does not come easy in the storms of life. When we start jumping to conclusions about what God is or isn’t doing in any given situation, instead of leaving things in His hands and trusting Him to do what is best for us, we often end up disappointed. The majority of our issues, however, come from thinking that the “best” means the most lucrative or easiest. Our definition of “good” and “bad” are based on what we can see with our own eyes, or ideas, but God has the vision and perspective of eternity and knows every aspect of our situations. My uncle used to say, “We don’t really want to trust God to take care of us because what if He doesn’t take care of us like we want to be taken care of?” I think that is more accurate than most of us would like to admit. God doesn’t want us to get so conditioned by life that we lose our passion, joy and peace. He doesn’t want us to ask Him for things and not care what the answer is. He wants us to be content in the outcome of our requests as a result of understanding who He is and how much He loves us, not because we simply stopped expecting anything from Him.
As people of faith, we know that eventually everything works out for our good, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have to deal with tears, discouragement, anger or depression along the way. What matters is how we keep walking in spite of it. It doesn’t mean we won’t have times where we are so tired or discouraged that we curl up into a ball to try and catch our breath; what matters is what we do with that breath when it returns. Will we use it to perpetuate the darkness around or within us, or will we lift our voice like Paul and Silas in prison and praise the One who loves us and has promised to take care of us?
The Cadence of My Soul 