HopeIt doesn’t matter if you’re eighteen, twenty-eight,
forty-five, or seventy-three, the truth is at every age, there are simply Things We Don’t Know We Don’t Know.

We learn a great deal from personal experience and through the experiences of others, but no matter how wise we are, we still have blind spots in our awareness. And sometimes those blind spots play a major role in the decisions we make, for better or worse.

One of my blind spots has been understanding the difference between hope and expectation, and how these two characteristics affect how we love others and respect their agency. 

When we have a hope for someone we love, of course we want the best for them, and we celebrate their joys and mourn when they mourn, but our love isn’t predicated upon them living their lives the way we think is best for them.  We can hope for the best for them, offer insight, share experiences, and support them in the ways we are able, but our love and acceptance of them doesn’t increase or decrease based on what they do.  This is how God is with all of us. We make poor choices all the time, but His love is constant.

Expectation, though, is another matter.  When we approach someone we love with an expectation for them, even if it’s a good thing we’re expecting, and maybe even the right thing for them (in our opinion), then we start getting into the realm of impacting their agency. 

There are natural consequences to all our actions, which follow our choices, but if we are loving others unconditionally, we do not extend and withhold acceptance and love of them based on their agency choices. God does not interfere with our agency. He calls, persuades, guides, directs, but our choices are ours and He will not force us to choose the path that He knows will bring us greatest joy. And He loves us constantly, no matter what.

I have friends whose children have made choices that they disagree with, and their children have sensed the disappointment and sadness in their parent, and in response they pull away emotionally.  Which of course hurts everyone. The parent feels justified blaming the child for the choices they disagree with, the child feels bad and senses the shift in love, and pulls further away, and so the cycle goes until the once warm, loving relationship is lost. If that parent had only managed to convey their unconditional love for the child, in a way that the child knew there was nothing in the world that could alter their parent’s love for them, the toll on the family would have been considerably less. It’s the only possible way to maintain healthy relationships, in fact.

It was a serious wake up call after I was divorced to realize that I’d been living my very own Pride and Prejudice experience throughout my marriage. My spouse had changed in some significant ways that were hard for me, but I clung for years and years to the guy I married instead of unconditionally loving the man he’d become.  I couldn’t let go of my memory of the boy I fell in love with and the plans we’d made for our future lives together. But he changed courses, and I never made peace with how he evolved as we grew up.  I always held on to the person I wanted him to be, and not the good man that he actually was and is.  While it was a lot more complicated than that, this was my contribution to the cycle of sadness for both of us that ultimately resulted in divorce.

If I had managed to figure this out during our marriage, how different would our experiences have been? If he had felt unconditionally loved and not judged by me, how much hurt could have been avoided? How much joy and love do we miss out on when we, in our pride and blindness, judge others, and fail to love them exactly as they are?

Have you experienced the difference between loving someone and hoping they change versus expecting that change? How have you learned to walk that fine line? 


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