THE EMOTIONAL ASPECT – No. 9

In my last post I wrote about how powerful our expectations are and that we all have expectations of everyone from ourselves, to others, to even God, Himself. In the next few posts I will personalize this truth by sharing some of my expectations that have caused me some frustration and have affected my relationships with others and with God.

First, my expectations of myself… I’ve always been quite an active person. So having a disease that increasingly limits my physical abilities has been a challenge. At first I expected to be able to maintain my previous levels of involvement in our busy social life, church meetings and school activities. This resulted in me exhausting not only myself but also many of those around me, especially my wife. This finally drove home to me the fact that my expectations of myself and Nicky had been unrealistic.

After many efforts to carry on keeping life as ‘normal’ as possible, Nicky and I decided to stay in on weeknights and to limit ourselves to only one social engagement per weekend, preferably during the day. Late nights are not very kind to my body, especially when we need to be up at 6:00 a.m. for school during the week.

We’ve also had to make some difficult choices regarding our involvement in church activities. After consulting with the leadership of the church, we stepped down from leading our homecell group on Tuesday evenings and now only attend homecell meetings if we or our neighbours are hosting the meeting. In addition, we’ve had to choose to skip most of the Sunday evening prayer meetings, not because they’re not vitally important, but because it makes for a very long day at the beginning of the week.

Finally, I’ve also had to shift my expectations of my body. The progressive nature of this disease means that things I used to be able to do easily are now much more difficult if not impossible to do. This translates into having to constantly having to shift my expectations of my body. To further complicate matters, my physical strength also varies with my degree of tiredness, the time of day and my ability to take in enough fluids.

Shifting my expectations of myself and my body has helped to reduce my level of frustration at the things I can no longer do, and has helped me in my efforts to remain focused on the things I can still do. In my next post I will explore my expectations of others and how they have affected my relationships with them.