C’mon, you’re 16? Know how to drive perfectly. Attempt to obtain a driver’s license. Pass the test on your first try. Score well on the ACT/SAT. Take it again and score even higher. Have a thriving social life. Participate in 5 extracurricular activities minimum. Exercise often.Seriously, you’re 17. Apply to college. Receive a high scholarship. Pick a major. Have a plan for college. You’re grown up now, don’t be overly emotional. Have a plan of what you want to do with your life.
Alright now, 18-year-old. Get into college. Graduate high school with honors. Move in to college. Do not take a gap year. Do not go into trade school. Do not go to community college. Pick a highly accredited, highly attended, highly funded, highly known university. Have a 5-year plan. Have a 10-year plan. You’re an adult now, act like one. Function independently.
Let’s get serious now. You’re 19. Be thriving in college. Meet “the one”. Do not change your major. Do not express yourself in ways outside of the norm. Do not change your political/religious/etc. opinions regardless of new information and/or insight learned at university. Have a job. Participate in extracurricular activities.
No longer a teenager, 20-year-old. Pay your own bills. File your taxes. Be financially independent. Move out of your parents’ house. Balance full-time school, a job, financial responsibility, social life, and prepare to be married soon. Do not complain. Self-manage your stress. Do not question your faith. Accept what you’ve always been told.
You’re a legal adult, 21. Try a drink. Do not drink often. Get engaged. Have yourself entirely figured out. Do not change your major. You made your life-plan at 17-years-old… stick with it. Obtain a credit card. Don’t over use it.
Feelin’ 22. Graduate with a bachelor’s degree. Obtain a full-time job. Consider higher education. Pay off your student loan debt. Get married. Know who you are. Have your life figured out. Have a social life. Visit your family often. Serve in a church. Begin a family right away. Have kids.
And on and on and on, it goes.
Have you ever found yourself buried in expectation? Sometimes they fall upon us like waves. Sometimes we can brush them off. Most times, they tangle themselves into the fabric of our life and perspective in a similar way to how weeds complicate a garden. Have you felt the pressure? Have you felt the tangling? Have you felt dragged down by the weight of expectation? Have you maybe even felt bound by them? Held victim to them?
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I grew up in a small town. Mom and dad were crazy about growing our own vegetables (mainly dad) so I spent most summer days working outside. In our big yard in our little village of 500 people, we had a big garden where we grew peppers, tomatoes, strawberries, carrots (my personal favorite), cucumbers, and more. If you’ve ever gardened before, you know that most of the work is done in the ground. Once you get the ground ready, as long as there is plenty of sunlight and regular water, the seeds will take care of themselves and by the end of that season, you’ll have vegetables/fruits a-plenty.
But unfortunately, the work never quite stops there.
Planting the seeds really doesn’t take too much time. Harvesting doesn’t take much time, either. That’s why dad always assigned me and my 5 siblings the WORST (but most necessary) task: weeding the garden.
Hours felt like years to my younger self. The warm sun and my dirty hands would find themselves pulling out weeds to salvage the plant being grown. I would also find my perfectionist-leaning self to follow my younger siblings and pull out what they missed or skipped over.
Being a junior in college, I no longer spend my summer pulling weeds for my parents… but I found that I never really stopped pulling weeds, metaphorically speaking.
The expectations, such as the ones above, that are spoken over to us work similarly like weeds to our spirit and growth. One of the biggest problems with weeds, or expectations, is that they don’t just get tangled around us, but they take root, too.
Looking back at my time weeding the garden, I noticed some problems with assigning young, inexperienced gardening hands to such a meticulous task:
If you don’t pull weeds from the root, all you’ve done is sit in the hot sun and get dirty and sweaty for nothing. The weeds will pop up faster than you pulled them out (or so it seems).
On top of weeding our garden, we were also tasked weeding mom’s flower beds… which she loved to plant under rock. Scraping up your hands for hours was not so fun, so sometimes we would take a short-cut and rip weeds off at the top. It would definitely make the job go by faster. But then, by morning, all the weeds were back, and we would have to spend another one of our summer days taking care of the weeds once more.
Expectations can take root in us… deeply, and quickly. Sometimes we pick off the top of the weed to hide that it’s there. In the same sense, we often like to pretend that societal expectations don’t affect us, and we are somehow immune to the crippling feeling when you aren’t married by 21 or have your life figured out by 22 or take a little extra time to graduate (or whatever it is).
Have you felt it? Have you hidden it? Have you bent over backwards to meet expectations that were placed there unfairly?
Without an experienced eye, it’s hard to discern between the fruit of the harvest and the weed. If you’re not detailed when you water what you’re trying to grow, you might accidentally water hidden weeds, too. And if you’re not careful, sometimes you’ll pull out the plant and leave the weed when trying to do the opposite.
This happened more time than once as a kid for me. Weeds do a great job of being imitation-plants. Now I’m not a science gal, but man these puppies somehow managed to pop up looking almost exactly like the actual plant. I wanted so badly to be strong and independent, so I would either 1. Pull out whichever looked best or 2. Pull neither.
Both were detrimental to the gardening process.
This happens with expectations, too.
Expectations that are placed on us unfairly have a skillful way of making themselves looking like they’re necessary. Did you know that they aren’t?
Have you ever felt so bound? Have you thought that expectations unfairly placed were rightfully built into the fabric of your life? Have you ever thought that there were things you had to do by a certain age/stage of life?
The process of pulling weeds is long, meticulous, monotonous, and you don’t see any result or reward really ever. When you’re weeding the garden, you simply have to trust that your hard work is going to pay off when the fruit comes and truly, you’ll never actually know exactly what type of effect it had.
I developed a decently good work-ethic early on in life. However, some days, I really didn’t wanna work. Sometimes I convinced myself the process of weed-pulling was unnecessary, and the garden could probably grow just fine without me doing all this work.
I deceived myself that the work I was doing to tend to the harvest was in vain because I wasn’t able to see any immediate results.
Man, oh man, do we do this as we grow. The process of working through which expectations are healthy and which ones are placed on us unfairly is a monotonous, meticulous, and sometimes painful process. It is one that seems like it isn’t doing much good.
But once the fruit comes, the work will have all been worth it.
Have you ever been there? Have you ever strived towards personal growth and stopped when doing the “small stuff” because you were unable to see actual results?
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Have you felt it? Have you hidden it? Have you bent over backwards to meet expectations that were placed there unfairly? Have you ever felt so bound? Have you thought that expectations unfairly placed were rightfully built into the fabric of your life? Have you ever thought that there were things you had to do by a certain age/stage of life? Have you ever been there? Have you ever strived towards personal growth and stopped when doing the “small stuff” because you were unable to see actual results?
If I was a betting woman, I would bet that you answered “yes” to at least one of these questions and listen, there’s no shame in it.
We’ve all been there.
But I’m here to suggest freedom. And not just a freedom that is arbitrary, but the kind of personal freedom that you work towards.
I’m here to declare that the process of weeding is necessary, important, and truly yields results.
So with that, I challenge you.
Pull the weed from the root. Figure out what expectations you’ve allowed to bind you and hold you back.Discern what the fruit is. God has planted you, I guarantee, to yield fruit. But we are not puppets on a string; God gives the tools of good ground, water, and working hands. But it is our job to maintain what it is He is wanted to grow within us. Weed it out. Water it. Stop watering the expectations and start watering the fruit.
Take time to discover who it is that God has made you to be. Stop pulling God down from heaven and putting Him into your constrained thinking, and allow Him to take you deeper into His heart by the meticulous tasks of working on you.
MOST IMPORTANTLY: let the One with the Skilled-Hand do the weeding for you. Open your heart, mind, and spirit and allow God to help you in discerning and help you in the weeding.
When we are willing, The Master-Gardener will use us. He will plant us. He will work on us. But sometimes, He’ll ask us, His kids, to walk with Him in His vision and assist Him in working. He sees the garden when it is fully bloomed- remember that you are not yet there… but you will be.
xoxo.
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