Living Expectantly

This was part of a message from Chuck Swindoll that we received this week:

Do you live expectantly? Do the little things excite you? Do you imagine the improbable and expect the impossible? Life is full and running over with opportunities to see God's hand in little things. Only the most sensitive of His servants see them, smile, and live on tiptoe.

Children can teach us a lot about this kind of expectancy. Did you ever listen to a child pray? Their faith knows no bounds. And who are the least surprised people when God answers prayer? The children.

As we get older we grow too sophisticated for that. We use phrases like, "Let's be realistic about this." We lose that expectancy, that urgency of hope, that delightful, childlike, wide-eyed joy of faith that keeps us full of anticipation and excitement. May God deliver us from a grim, stoic, stale shrug of the shoulders! "Look, I haven't changed," He says. "I still delight in doing impossible things. I love to surprise you!"

When I read this, I couldn't help but remember something that happened with our daughter Ansley about 10 years ago (she was 5 or 6 years old). We had a computer and Ansley had just gotten a new computer game. But evidently we needed an upgrade because every time she wanted to play the game, it would go to a certain point in the game, and then stop with a message saying that our computer didn't have enough memory to continue past this point. I told Ansley that this game probably wouldn't work on our computer. A little while later, she told me "Mom, I KNOW my game is going to work tomorrow. Because I prayed to God and asked Him to fix it and I KNOW that it will work." She was so sure of herself that I didn't have the heart to tell her that it probably still wouldn't work (I mean, does God install more computer memory??). Evidently He does. Because the next day and everyday after that, the game worked. Same computer, same game. A little girl with child like faith and a mom who learned that God DOES love to surprise us.