Sunday, September 28, 2008

Expectations

Today at church, our pastor talked about the passage in John where Jesus interacts with the Samaritan woman at the well. He preached on the fact that Jesus will always exceed our expectations and that we should evaluate what we expect God to do and see if there is a core issue in our lives that God is wanting to work on.

As he was preaching, I thought about the fact that there are some issues where I expect God not to do something. One specific area of life where, truthfully, I don't expect God to do something is having children. This may be an unrealistic expectation, but if I am truly honest, that is the way I feel. I think that I feel safe in this expectation because it limits my hopes. It takes away some of the pressure of even trying to have a child. It's not that I don't want to have children, but I often wonder if God intends for us to have children.

I know that my reliance needs to be completely on God and that I will only have value in Him. My value in His eyes is not dependent on whether or not I have children. It would be a little easier, though, if I knew for sure what the future will hold on this issue. Are we supposed to try harder? How are we supposed to proceed? What exactly does God want us to do? In some ways, life would be easier if we could have the answers to our questions. I don't need to know why, I just want to know if.

1 comment:

Tracy said...

You know, when I was younger, I thought seriously for a bit about becoming a surrogate. Not because of the money, but because I seemed to have children very easily; and I had friends who could not have children. But, like you, I could never determine what is God's will in all of that. How much does God want us messing with things like this? How do you decide what He finds is acceptable and what He does not? At the time the scriptures were written, I'm sure they never thought about people having the ability to do the kinds of things medicine can do now. It is a very hard and perplexing problem. That is why I don't judge those who choose to either do nothing, or those who chose to go to all lengths medically. Because I truly have no idea which is right, or even if there IS a "right."