Expectation is the root of all heartache.
—Anonymous
Nothing convinces you of the reality that all humans are broken and in need of grace than living with a group of people in a small space. Over a period of fifteen years, I was roommates or housemates with thirty-nine different people. I married my husband in my midthirties, which brought the total of different humans I had lived in close proximity with to forty. Each one of these beautifully complex people has shown me what brokenness looks like. I saw their brokenness up close and personal, and my own brokenness was revealed to me—I am not always an easy person to live with. I have learned so much from every person I have shared space with. In particular, I’ve learned that expectations are at the core of every conflict. We all have expectations for others, for ourselves, and for the experiences we have in life. It’s only a matter of time before one or two—or ten—of those expectations come crashing down as we experience something completely different than we had anticipated.
Pastor Joseph Steinke calls these high expectations a utopian hope. As soon as I heard him use that phrase, I thought about the countless utopian hopes I have had over the years. Living with a group of people in community came to my mind right away! I had bought a house in the city, and six of my friends moved in. That meant there were seven women trying to live in one house with one fridge and only two bathrooms (not to mention the hyper dog). I remember thinking we would live together, pray together, and share what we had, and it would be a wonderful space for community and growth! It’s like we would be living a modern-day experience of the community described in Acts. While that season in my life was wonderful in many ways, it turns out that living with that many women in a small amount of space—with a ton of opinions and all our issues—was really challenging. We learned how to do it well, but it was super-hard work.
Before that, I had utopian hopes about what college would be like, followed by seminary. Neither were what I expected. I had high expectations for what planting a church would be like and how easy it would be for my church to serve others in the neighborhood. I had no room for the idea of difficulty, hardship, or challenge in my utopian hopes for the church. It’s been very difficult to serve a congregation and to serve our city. Nearly every day I wonder if we are doing this well and if all our efforts are making a difference.
Pastor Steinke has a name for coming down from our high expectations: the utopian slope. Sometimes the slope is slow and steady, like a child’s slide. Other times you go down the slope like you’re an Olympic skier on a steep headwall. Or perhaps it feels like you are thrust up and down and winding this way and that, as though you are on a roller coaster. Nearly everyone I talk to has some sort of utopian hope that has turned into a utopian slope. I am not sure what it is for you, it could be a job, marriage, having kids, grad school, traveling, starting your own business, the list could go on.
Going down the utopian slope is discouraging, and it influences our relationship with God and other people—especially when our utopian hope has been in the church or in a relationship with a pastor or mentor. When I was growing up, I lived through what are often called mountaintop experiences, when I felt like my utopian hope was really happening! Gathering with other Jesus followers felt like heaven was reaching down to touch the earth. In these times, God felt close enough that I could almost hear God whispering my name. Coming down from these mountaintop experiences felt like another kind of utopian slope. Right down into the valley.
Psalm 139 is one of the lament psalms I mentioned in the last chapter. In it, the psalmist prays:
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.[1]
I think it’s safe to say that the psalmist has experienced the descent of the utopian slope.
Thinking about our expectations as utopian hopes that are sometimes dashed—becoming utopian slopes—is a helpful metaphor. But we may need a bit more of a process-oriented illustration, so I’d like to suggest a new metaphor: LEGOs. Yes, the little bricks designed for children that some of us still build with on occasion (no shame!).
The experience I am about to describe can happen in any season of life, but I’ll use college as an example because I’ve worked in that environment for fifteen years. I have had variations of this conversation on many occasions:
Student: I’m just struggling so much. It’s like everything I thought I knew is crashing down around me. These classes are blowing my mind; my classmates had totally different experiences than I had in high school. We’re reading books that say what seems like the opposite of what my pastor preached at my church back home. Not to mention all of the injustice I’m seeing now that I had no clue about growing up in the suburbs. I’m just so confused.
Me: Man, what you’re going through is super-hard—but it’s totally normal. It means you’re doing a great job of beginning to think critically and taking personal responsibility for your life and your faith. You didn’t think #adulting was just about learning to pay your car insurance or eat your vegetables, did you?
Student: Well, no, but when I thought about coming to a Christian college, I just thought it would be different. I thought it would feel like hanging out with my best friends, having a blast, learning about Jesus, and figuring out what I wanted to do with my life by taking interesting classes.
Me: It’s normal to have those expectations, but I think what you were picturing was more like the best week you ever had at Bible Camp, not a realistic expectation for the challenges college would bring.
Student: Haha. (sarcastic laugh, not appreciating my jab)
Me: Okay, here’s a way to think about it. Imagine one of those green LEGO boards that you had when you were growing up. Now picture that your whole life, people have been placing LEGO bricks on your board. You also added some bricks, and you have been building a tower of sorts, stacking the bricks on top of each other. The bricks represent beliefs, concepts, and ideas. Things you have come to know as truths.
(Now that I have had this conversation so many times, I actually keep a LEGO board and LEGOs in my office at the seminary. NOT to play with, just for the illustration . . . mostly. These students are typically nineteen or twenty, so when they imagine their LEGO board it seems full to them. They feel that they have learned and experienced so much! They will soon realize how much more life experience they will have, even in just the next few influential years.)
Me: By the time most people get to college, they have something that looks like a tower; they maybe even feel proud of and confident about their tower. The tower represents their worldview, or paradigm of understanding God, themselves, and the world. They assume that nothing could happen in this new environment to threaten the tower, especially because their whole lives have been built upon it. What happens pretty quickly, if they are paying attention, is that the tower becomes less stable. Perhaps it leans significantly to one side and some of the bricks seem oddly placed. Classes like the one you mentioned cause them to wonder how some of the bricks even got there. It feels like the professor is pointing at your haphazard tower, almost forcing you to remove one brick after another—it can be embarrassing and terrifying.
Student: Yeah! That’s totally what it feels like. No one else seems to be struggling like I am, but they probably can’t see what I am going through either. I had never heard of some of the perspectives that were shared in class. I felt so dumb that I had come to think my perspective was the only one—even the right one. But now I’m not sure about anything anymore.
Me: Good! Even though uncertainty is challenging, you are thinking critically about your perspective. That helps you grow as a person.
Student: Well, my tower crashing down doesn’t feel like growth.
Me: Totally, I get that. The tower coming down is a process we often call deconstruction, and when you do that, it feels like you are going backward rather than making progress. Often, the process of deconstruction happens slowly, but other times it’s like someone smashed your tower in one fell swoop. The good news is, you can begin to reconstruct now that you have a clear LEGO board. You’ll find that there are still some useful bricks left—cornerstone beliefs and concepts that you are able to build off of.
Student: It feels discouraging, like I’m starting over.
Me: But you aren’t! The bricks are still sitting around your LEGO board for you to examine. This time, you get to decide if and how each brick gets placed. You can place a brick or two as you reconstruct your perspective and your faith. And you can then change your mind and take them off again. This is all a part of the process. The good news is that the structure that you rebuild will be much sturdier and able to hold firm under pressure. I hate to break it to you—your life will have some awesome experiences, but it will also have some really difficult storms. You’ll want your new paradigm to hold up as you go through them.
Student: I know I know. I don’t expect life to be easy all the time! (rolls eyes at me)
Me: Then you will see why it’s important to be intentional and keep deconstructing and reconstructing. Some people get frustrated and shove their LEGO board away on a shelf to get dusty. Let’s just say it doesn’t go well for them. Before they know it, and without their input, another equally unstable tower is built. It’s not easy to do this emotional, spiritual, and intellectual work. But most things that are important in life are challenging. The best advice I can give you is not to do this process alone. Let’s brainstorm who the people are that you trust the most to share your journey with.
A few days after a conversation like this, I try to remember to stick one of those five-dollar LEGO sets in the student’s post-office box with a note letting them know that I am praying for them. I have had to deconstruct and reconstruct my tower a number of times. I am increasingly comfortable with the reality that I feel more sure but about fewer things in life. Holding the tension of uncertainty has become easier as I do this work intentionally. We can grow in our capacity to hold tension when we practice and when others do this work with us.
This process I just illustrated goes beyond the utopian hope and the inevitable utopian slope and gives us a few more steps in the process. Alan Roxburgh, a researcher and professor, outlines the process of paradigm change:
Anytime we undergo a change of paradigm, we go through a similar process. The question is not, Will our paradigms change? Rather the question is whether we will be intentional with the process or if we will just let it happen to us without engaging fully.
Here are some experiments that could help you move from confusion to intention when it comes to reconstructing.
Take a sheet of paper and turn it so you can write horizontally. Draw a line from one side to the other in the center of the page. On the left, write the year you were born, on the far right put an arrow because there is so much yet to come in your life.
Take time to go through year by year and write in any experience that you would consider spiritual in any way. For the sake of this experiment, consider this definition of spiritual: something that was a part of a religious ceremony or gathering, something that seemed to transcend the material or physical aspect of you and the world, and any time where you feel like you felt or experienced God.
After taking time to fill out your timeline, meditate on the following questions:
Find a conversation partner and talk through what you discovered in this experiment. If thinking about these experiences makes you feel like the past has power over you or you feel stuck, it is a great idea to process this timeline with a counselor or therapist.
In Latin, this phrase means divine reading, and this ancient Christian practice can be followed with any passage of Scripture. For this exercise, here are two passages that are honest about the difficult aspects of a life of faith with others. The framework of the utopian hope and slope can be a guide for this listening: 2 Corinthians 4:7–12 and/or 2 Timothy 2:14–16. Here is an outline you can follow. If anything doesn’t feel genuine to you, feel free to skip it. Try doing a practice like this once a day for a week to allow this experiment to lead to greater discovery and meaning.
Find a conversation partner and talk through what you discovered in this experiment.
Often when we have experienced the descent from a utopian hope down a long utopian slope, we have to reckon with shattered expectations. When we have expectations of a grand experience or a significant transformation and those expectations aren’t met, we are bogged down with all the what ifs and why nots. While those questions have their place, it can feel crowded in our minds and hearts. Choosing a practice of simplicity is an experiment that often helps people find clarity in their current situation. I suggest picking a reasonable time frame to start with for this practice. A month is usually a good starting point.
Take out your calendar and pull up your checking account. These two things give us the most insight as to what areas of life could use some simplicity. Ask the question, What might I prune or trim in my life to make space? Perhaps you are going to cut back on nights out or Netflix or take a break from a committee you are on. Additionally, you could choose not to spend money in a certain area this month, for instance on an often-purchased beverage or choosing to bring lunch to work rather than purchasing it.
Next, look at your physical spaces: home, office, car, and so on. Choose at least one space to deliberately simplify at least for a few weeks. For example, if you typically have a lot of piles, frames, or extra objects on your desk, remove them for a month of simplicity in that space.
Now that you’ve chosen to simplify some aspects of life, invite just one aspect to be added to the simplified space. Write down on a sheet of paper all of the things you feel your heart pulled toward, that you would consider wrong in the world around you. For instance, you might say that your heart goes out to those who are experiencing homelessness or people who are feeling isolated or lonely. Make a long list. Then choose just one area you could take action on in your life.
Finally, consider the following three ways to participate in this area: finances, time, and prayer. Let’s use the passion for those experiencing homelessness as an example: First, financially invest in an organization supporting those without a home. Second, find at least two time frames when you can volunteer in a way that will give you direct relational experience with folks experiencing homelessness. Third, if you are in a season where you are able to pray, put a reminder in your phone or on your mirror to pray for this area of need.
Give financially, give time, and offer prayers.
This is an experiment that is really effective to do with a roommate, friend, or partner. Set an end date, and after it has passed, talk through what you experienced and discovered in this monthlong experiment.