The Unexpected

“Oft expectation fails, and most oft where it promises,

And oft it hits where hope is coldest and despair most fits.”

-William Shakespeare  ‘All’s Well That Ends Well.’

People sometimes say that in the end things tend to work out the way they were supposed to.  Some Christians put a finer point on it saying God has a plan and all things work according to His will. However, even as a Christian, I must confess that I don’t know how or why things turn out the way they do.  But I do know that seldom is the end what I expected in the beginning.  And when it hurts, I try very hard not to blame God.

We all start out with hopes and dreams which motivate us and create expectations.  Then life happens.  Look under life’s covers, anyone’s life, and you will see mostly unexpected events and unexpected outcomes.  Hopes fade.  Dreams die.  Marriages don’t last.  Jobs don’t work out and careers go in an unexpected direction.  Children from good homes with all the advantages go wrong and their parents never saw it coming.  Accidents, illness, bad choices or other people’s bad choices, a great wind or a bolt of lightning.  All unexpected, or at least unexpected until it is too late.  

We live in a broken, chaotic world.  Some of us contribute to that condition more than others. But even the best of us cannot avoid reality.  We cannot imagine, much less expect planes flying into buildings.  A global pandemic in an age of modern medicine and miracle drugs?  Unthinkable and unexpected. Donald Trump President? No one saw that coming 25 years ago. 

History is loaded with the unexpected.  No one expected America’s Civil War to last so long or kill so many Americans.  In the beginning most thought World War One would be settled and over in months.  That’s not how it worked out.  When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor I seriously doubt they expected that in less than 4 years the United States would develop the atomic bomb and actually drop it on two of their cities?  Who could have imagined much less expected that in the twentieth century millions of innocent citizens would be killed or starved to death by their governments (both Fascists and Communists).  Go back thousands of years and you will find that most of the world’s great empires rose quickly and unexpectedly.  And after a few hundred years, just as unexpectedly collapsed.

Expect the unexpected. What is left to us is to hope for the best while expecting and preparing for the worst.  If we are among the fortunate, reality ends up somewhere in between.