For those who are tired of living as a forecast, and for the teachers of stillness who showed me that a house can be built where weather cannot reach. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life. — Proverbs 13:12 What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. — James 4:14 Not my will, but yours, be done. — Luke 22:42 Be still, and know that I am God. — Psalm 46:10 Are you the kind of person who has expectations? That is the question with which this book begins, and it is not a small question. It is not a psychological parlor game. It is not a demand that you become a person without plans. It is a question about the hidden architecture of a life. I think we all have expectations. I do not think there is any honest way around that fact. Our lives are built around them. Part of that building is natural, even necessary. We plan. We rise in the morning expecting the sun. We go to work expecting a world that will still be there when we arrive. We plant a seed expecting a harvest we will not see for months. Expectation, in this first and humble sense, is simply how a finite creature inhabits time. Then there are expectations of another kind. These are not plans. They are pictures. They are outcomes we have already rehearsed in the imagination, and then quietly installed as conditions of our peace. When the world, or God, or another human being fails to conform to the picture, something in us sickens. Scripture has a sentence for that sickness that has never been improved upon: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” This book is an attempt to deconstruct that second kind of expectation without destroying the first. It is an attempt to tell the difference between hope and presumption, between faith and demand, between a life built on stone and a life built on sand. It is also an attempt to look, without flinching, at the forces that move through other people and through ourselves—good and malevolent, conscious and unconscious, angelic and dark. I have written philosophically and spiritually because the subject will not sit still in one discipline. The Bible speaks to it with a severity and a tenderness that no modern manual can match. Contemporary science, particularly the neuroscience of prediction, the psychology of attachment, and the study of authority and suggestion, has begun to describe in laboratory language what the prophets and apostles already knew in the language of the soul. I have tried to let those voices speak to one another rather than to force them into a single dialect. You will not find here a technique for getting what you want. You will find, if I have done my work, a way of holding what you want with open hands. You will find a warning about outcome-based identity, outcome-based relationships, and the quiet idolatry of the imagined future. You will find the old prayer that still judges every other prayer: “Not my will, but thine be done.” If you are looking for a method that will make life obey you, close this volume and keep looking. If you are willing to consider that the most dangerous thing you carry may be the picture of how things must turn out, then we can begin.
