Expectation: the act or the state of expecting or something something expected: a thing looked forward to.

Everyone has expectations for their life. We place high expectations on ourselves from a very young age. As life happens and takes it twists and turns the expectations we have change over time. Most of the time life does not turn out to be anything like the expectations that we had planned for out lives. What happens when we have placed our lives in God’s hands and our expectations dont turn out like we had planned? But they are exactly what He planned.

When our expectations are not met we begin to wander in the desert and we allow our hearts to wander. We start to wander into our own way of thinking and we start to doubt that God can do what He says He can do. We begin to rely on our own undertsanding of things instead of trusting that God knows what is best for me and for you.

Circumstances also make our hearts wander away from God. When you lose that perfect job that you have put your whole life into and the bills are piling up. You get the call from the doctor and you hear the news that you have cancer and it does not look good. You have your house stolen by foreclosure. Your marriage has fallen apart and now divorce is a word you know well.

Circumstances and unmet expectations cause our hearts to wander. Wander means to stray from a path, place or companion without a fixed plan. Heart means the center of the total personality or the innermost central part of anything. When we put these two together we have the innermost part of us straying from place to place without a fixed plan. This is what most often happens to us when our expectations are not met.

At some point in our lives we have had an expectation of God. Somewhere in your life you made up your mind about who God is and what He is like. You may have been influenced by someone else’s bad experience with God. It may not have been a bad experience with God but maybe a bad experience of church. Either one has made you search no more. Somewhere in your own walk things did not go the way you thought they should have and you became enslaved to disappointment.

What is your expectation or circumstance that left you with a wandering heart?