Unclutter Your Soul: A 7-Day DevotionalSample

Confess Your Expectations

One summer’s day, not long after we moved into our new (temporary) home, not long after I launched my first book, I sat outside in the sun and opened my hands, tuning my heart to the voice of Love. It sounds simple and lovely and easy enough, but this was the summer I could barely manage to get out of bed. I was tempted to avoid God, to self-protect from Him. What if He disappointed me too? For me to sit in the sun and open my hands toward heaven cost me something; it was a sacrifice. It was a sacrifice of self—if there was even any part of me left (I wasn’t so sure).

Remember the verse—the one you memorized when you were young and full of hope? The one about expectation? The one about your hope not being disappointed? The whisper went.

“Yes,” I responded in the language of tears.

I went and found my old Amplified Bible. The one where I first marked the verse in red pen: “Surely there is a future [and a reward], and your hope and expectation will not be cut off” (Proverbs 23:18 AMP). I took those words marked in my Bible, and upon my heart, and wrote them in red on a 3x5 index card. And as an act of faith, I taped them to the unfamiliar black lacquer fridge in the kitchen, where I’d have to face them every day.

Even though I felt unmoored, there I was, anchored. I’ve learned that we ought to always pay attention when God says, “Surely.”

How do you self-protect? It seems like a natural enough response. Yet in our attempt to protect ourselves we harm ourselves in the long run. We shut out people and we shut down potential opportunities. We barricade roads and avenues that are often the very way out and forward.

The question is not whether we will or will not experience disappointment—we will. The question is, Who or what are we putting our hope in? A good deal of soul clutter can originate in the expectations we have of others and the hope we put in them.

Maybe the expectations were not even yours in the first place; someone else drew them up for you. Perhaps someone with loving intentions promised you the world. And you believed them, you trusted them. Because why wouldn’t you? They had always been good for their word. Putting our expectation—even our hope—in another person usually doesn’t happen through a verbal agreement. Usually, we don’t even realize it has happened until that very important person—a husband, a mother, a father, a friend—disappoints us. Until the world all comes crashing down. Sometimes the cracked mirror becomes the clearest reflection because it reveals all the tiny breaks and hairline fractures that were there all along.

The safest place to put our hope is in Christ. That summer when I was at the bottom of the bottom—feeling as if I had lost all hope—Christ remained my anchor of hope. He was anchored to me. There I was, unmoored and anchored simultaneously. Christ is called our living hope. If you don’t feel very alive, imagine Him doing the living in you. Not getting our hopes up is not a strategy to avoid disappointment; it’s an unhealthy coping mechanism.

I don’t know what you are facing. What loss you have experienced. Who has let you down. What you’ve had to lay down. What gives you reason to feel hopeless. What keeps you up at night and overwhelms you during the day. But God knows. He also knows the dreams and desires of your heart that you’ve tried to abandon, because they, too, feel risky, like hope. Whether from a long fall from idealistic dreams or a life lived at a baseline of hopelessness—you gave yourself permission not to hope, you agreed to live this way. As I write this, my prayer for you is that today you give yourself permission to hope and believe again.

Our good Father did not design us to live waiting for the other shoe to drop or the floor to fall out from under us. Nor did He design us to put our expectations in other people, in our own plans, or in well-intentioned programs or systems. When we align our thinking with His Word, we are reminded that when our hope is in Christ, our expectation will not be cut off—surely.

Respond

When in your life have you felt hopeless? 

How did you cope with the feeling? Did you turn to Jesus for help?

What was the outcome?

Prayer

Lord Jesus, please be my hope, my peace, and my comfort when life is difficult.