We have a dry cleaning establishment in our city called Pasquale’s. I wouldn’t bother mentioning it except it is run by a Vietnamese family, which doesn’t quite fulfill one’s expectations upon entering. One does not hear “hola” as we come in the door. Expectations are a huge part of our lives. We usually shop at the same grocery store because we expect things to be in the same place week after week. It is disconcerting when the store moves stuff around. We marry people with expectations for a happy future. We have children with expectations of lots of running and shouting and sometimes crying around the house. When we find a brand of food we like we buy it again and again because of the expectation of its taste.
When we go to church we have expectations and often we are pleased and sometimes not. When the latter happens we sometimes go church shopping until we find one that does meet our expectations. When it comes to someday going to heaven we have expectations. The rich part of that is we are going to be so very wrong. Heaven will not meet our expectations because we don’t know how to imagine something glorious that we have never seen. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘“What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ — the things God has prepared for those who love him.” Later in I Corinthians Paul wrote about our resurrection bodies being as different as a seed is to the tree. Maple seeds don’t look anything like maple trees.
If you are a person who always wants to be right you can forget about going to heaven because you will be – I was about to say, “Dead Wrong.” But you will be “Live Wrong.”
Written by Roger Bothwell on February 20, 2014
Spring of Life, PO box 124, St. Helena, CA 94574
Rogerbothwell.org