Anticipation

Anticipation can open or close a path into tomorrow. It depends on what is being anticipated, for potential good or evil, gain or loss, pleasure or pain. Either way, anticipation sets in motion what may come, connecting us to what we seek or dread.

Be as careful with what you anticipate as with whom your invite into your home. What you anticipate may enter as a guest, but can take charge of your home. What may enter as a “what if” fear or concern, can come to dominate your inner landscape. Your fear may be the first voice you seek and listen to, prompting you to spend precious time and energy as if to prepare for what may never come, to the exclusion of the good that already exists before you. Fear can blind you, even temporarily, to the good right in front of you.

I have worked with persons whose anticipations had come to dominate their daily life, disabling their capacity to see, let alone enjoy the only thing that is really theirs: the gift of daily life, to be lived one day at a time, or never lived at all. Any day not fully lived and enjoyed will never return to be lived over again, but must be let go of so the next day can be embraced as yet another gift, with differing conditions and circumstances. This daily gift exchange of one day for the next will not cease until we leave this wondrous place of constant gifting.

When you begin a new week, every week, ask yourself what you anticipate for the next days ahead. What are you looking forward to, what are you dreading? How are your anticipations affecting your daily life, either to strengthen or debilitate you? Are you or your anticipations running your daily life and inner home?

I choose to anticipate that the best is yet to be. I lean into that anticipation, not as if I want to leave or lose what is now mine. Quite the contrary: I love my life, my wife and children, my work and community. I seek to stay in the saddle of my current life as long as I can.

But when it ends, when significant change dawns, as it surely will, I want to be ready to work through my loss and greet this new day with hope. My hope is that after this new day, yet another new day looms, which will be that best which was yet to be. This faith has kept me afloat, kept me bobbing over some stern waves which have broken across the expanse of my life.

I know what it is like to go under the water of despair, under the breathless weight of hopelessness. And I know what it is like to struggle back to the surface, thankful for the air still in my lungs, thankful for any buoyancy that helps get me back to the surface, to fresh air, to renewed hope, to better anticipations of what can and maybe even will come.

There is nothing quite like the sense of finding and stepping on firm, dry ground again. Anticipating good yet to be yours, good ahead and beyond any storm you may have to face, may have to walk through, offers you just such firm ground. But you have to choose to stand on it. And in order to do that, you must first anticipate that it will hold you. Such is the way of faith.