My wife Melissa has weird movie habits.
She will almost guaranteed hate a movie…if you tell her beforehand that it’s good. She cannot handle high expectations. On the other hand, if you act like a film was terrible, she’ll almost certainly love it. This is why, if she ever saw it, I maintain she’d be only person to love the most panned movie of recent years - Cats.
If there is one Person who we do not need to worry about having too high expectations for, it’s God. God always comes through, exceeding our expectations. This is what happens, for example, in the book of Esther. At the beginning of the tale, there is no way that Esther would have imagined becoming an honored queen of the Persian Empire, but she does. There is no chance that Mordecai – Esther’s cousin and a common man - would have had being second in command to the king on his radar, but that’s what he becomes. And the Jewish people – persecuted, threatened, and fasting in desperation in the first part of the story – would not have anticipated the ending, where they are feasting and celebrating their uplifting as a community.
God exceeds expectations. He does more than we can imagine (I could testify about this myself!). What He has in store for us on this earth is more momentous and important than we could probably conceive of at the moment, and the riches of eternal life who can even begin to comprehend?
I’ll leave us with Ephesians 3:20: “He is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to the power that is at work within us. To Him be glory!”
