Blinded by Expectation

What worries you most? Honestly going through the pantheon of all that occupies our thoughts and disrupts our sleep not only shows us our fears, but what we expect will relieve them in terms of the outcomes over which we obsess. Now imagine that you were suddenly free of all that worry, anxiety, and stress. What would that actually feel like? Jesus says it feels like Kingdom. Maybe we’ve not had the experience since we were still in the garden of our childhood, not knowing we were naked, with nothing separating us from the moment of waking through the cool of the evening with Presence. Arguably, all of human life is a working through a return to the Garden of our childhood. How do we do this? What keeps us from seeing the journey clearly? An often overlooked passage in the New Testament has given the church fits trying to interpret why John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, sends his own disciples from his prison cell to ask Jesus if he is the “expected one,” or if they should look for someone else. It’s amazing that someone with John’s credentials should ask such a question, and the church has scrambled to find mitigating reasons, but the simplest answer is that even John was blinded by his expectations of what Jesus as messiah would do and be and was not finding what he expected in his cousin. If John, the “greatest prophet born of woman” could be blinded by expectation, then we can too, and the way to Kingdom, back to Garden becomes a concerted effort to be present enough to see what is right before our eyes.