Anticipation
This summer, I had the tremendous opportunity to hike the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The weeks leading up the trip were punctuated with work travel, my daughter’s college graduation, and finding the right pair of blister-proof socks for the trail. Life is like that, yes? We are constantly shifting between big and small, important and mundane, preparing and experiencing. We are rarely aware, at the time, which moments will matter the most.
“What are you hoping for from your time on the Camino?” friends would ask. I had been late to sign up and hadn’t taken much time to consider. “I have no expectation — but great anticipation,” was my honest response.
It turns out that anticipation over expectation set the tone for my trip. As I walked alongside new friends for unhurried hours, they gifted me the deep privilege of hearing their stories. And of sharing my own.
Miles of dusty roads and cobblestone paths winding through sleepy villages, sheep grazing alongside babbling brooks in lush green forests, and the majestic swing of the massive Botafumeiro (incense burner) above a thousand weary pilgrims gathered in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela — all whispered echoes of Eden. They outperformed the guidebook ratings and the hopes of us all. Yet they did not change me.
Months after my return, what I carry in my soul are the stories of everyday saints — the privilege of bearing witness as they recounted years of wounding and provision and the beautiful messiness that marks every human life. I hadn’t even known what I had needed, but His hand hath provided.
Perhaps the difference between expectation and anticipation is a matter of posture: I have to pry my fingers loose from what I think life should be in order to open my hands to receive what life actually is.
“... and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.” John 2:9
When Jesus performed his first recorded miracle, most people missed it. But not the servants. They were attentively going about their everyday, blue collar jobs when the Creator of the Universe, Word Made Flesh, and Redeemer of All that is Broken, transformed the ordinary into extraordinary.
If the servants had been working the crowd to get a glimpse of the most powerful guest, hoping proximity to someone important might make their own work feel important, they would have missed the miracle unfolding right in the midst of the mundane.
The same is true for us.
It is in the ordinary settings of the boardroom or the cubicle or the coffee shop that the Maker reveals the extraordinary, and we are given a front row seat and an invitation to join Him.
As we go about our everyday work of scheduling meetings, returning emails, creating plans for the upcoming months, and even making once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimages, may we learn to develop the posture of anticipation, not expectation, and to develop the muscles of curiosity and presence.
Chaos to order.
Boredom to imagination.
Futility to purpose.
Despair to hope.
Water to wine.
This is what He does. This is Who He is.
To God be the glory, forever and ever, Amen.
“Made for spirituality, we wallow in introspection. Made for joy, we settle for pleasure. Made for justice, we clamor for vengeance. Made for relationship, we insist on our own way. Made for beauty, we are satisfied with sentiment. But new creation has already begun. The sun has begun to rise. Christians are called to leave behind, in the tomb of Jesus Christ, all that belongs to the brokenness and incompleteness of the present world ... That, quite simply, is what it means to be Christian: to follow Jesus Christ into the new world, God's new world, which he has thrown open before us.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Christian
