Ruth had not heard her son’s voice in three years.
Her husband Samuel died in the winter of 2021, in a hospital in Houston, during the worst months of the pandemic. Ruth was not allowed into his room. She said goodbye through a tablet held up by a nurse in a mask. At the funeral, which only twenty people could attend, her son David said something about his father’s last years. Ruth said something back. Both of them were grieving, and both of them were wrong. David drove back to Atlanta that night, and the silence began.
For the first year, Ruth waited for him to call. That was a wish. In the second year, something changed. Her pastor preached on 2 Kings 3, and Ruth went home and asked herself a hard question. If she truly expected her son to come home, what would she do differently?
She began to dig. She kept David’s old room ready instead of turning it into a sewing room as she had planned. She asked her granddaughter to teach her to send text messages, so that if the door ever opened a crack, she would know how to walk through it. She sent David a short message on his birthday and on Samuel’s birthday, asking for nothing. And after many drafts and many tears, she wrote him a letter. It did not defend what she had said at the funeral. It apologized for her part and left his part to him.
No reply came. Months passed. Ruth kept the room ready.
In November of the third year, her phone buzzed with a message she read four times before she believed it. “Mom, can Keisha and the kids and I come for Christmas?”
The Element That Takes "No" Off the Table
The eleventh element is the one many people want to start with. They want to believe that nothing is impossible before they have done anything else. But in the first edition I placed it last on purpose, and I wrote that once an expectation has gone through the other ten elements, “no” is no longer an acceptable option.
That order matters. Faith that skips the other ten is often fantasy dressed up in church clothes. The researcher Gabriele Oettingen spent years studying people who daydream about good outcomes, and she found that pleasant fantasies alone tend to lower effort, because the mind enjoys the reward before it is earned. The expectations that come to pass are usually the ones that have been expressed clearly, seen fully, carried with passion, guarded with rules, lived in the present, given a season, adjusted through change, handled with thoroughness and tact, given their rightful priority, and organized so they can be received. Only then do we stand in front of the mountain and say, “Be thou removed.”
Look at Ruth’s expectation through the ten. She expressed it in a letter, in writing, which is the strongest form. She had vision: hindsight about the funeral, foresight about what the silence would cost her grandchildren, insight into her own part, and the oversight of her pastor, who checked on her. Her passion was steady. Her rule of engagement was simple: if she felt the urge to defend herself, she would put the phone down and pray. She lived in the present, doing small things each month. She waited through the seasons. She changed her approach when waiting alone was not working. She was thorough, and she was tactful. She made it a priority. She kept the room ready. Only then did she say, in her prayers, “With God nothing shall be impossible.”
Blessed Is She That Believed
The angel Gabriel spoke the words of Luke 1:37 to Mary. But the story around them is full of women whose answers came late.
Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, had been called barren for most of her life. Her husband Zechariah was a priest who had prayed for a child for so long that when the answer came, he did not believe it. By the time Gabriel visited Mary, Elizabeth was six months pregnant in her old age. When Mary arrived at her house, Elizabeth said, “And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lord” (Luke 1:45).
Not a Promise That Every Wish Is Granted
I must be careful here, because this element is easily misused. “Nothing is impossible” does not mean that God is obliged to give us everything we want, in the form we want, at the time we want. Some people have been badly hurt by preaching that made it sound that way. They prayed for a healing that did not come, or a marriage that did not survive, and were told their faith was too small.
Every Answer Births a New Expectation
Ruth’s Christmas was not a film. David arrived tired from the drive. There was an awkward silence at dinner the first night, and a hard conversation on the porch the second night. Some of what was said needed saying. Some of it will take years to heal. But on the last morning, David stood in the doorway of his old room and saw that it had been kept. He did not say much. He hugged his mother for a long time.
A Case Study for You
The first edition closed this chapter with an exercise, and I keep it here because it remains one of the most useful things in this book.
List five areas or events of recent failure or disappointment in your life. For each one, go through the eleven elements one by one. Which were present? Which were missing? What could have been done better in each element? Be honest, but be kind to yourself. You are not grading your worth. You are learning where to dig next time.
What has changed since the first edition
We live in an age that is both too hopeful and too hopeless. On one side, social media is full of promises that you can manifest anything by thinking about it hard enough. On the other side, the news is full of reasons to expect nothing at all. Many young people in particular have been trained by a decade of crisis to keep their expectations low, so that nothing can disappoint them.
The eleventh element answers both. To the manifestation crowd it says: thinking is not enough; do the ten. To the hopeless it says: after you have done the ten, you are allowed to hope, and you are allowed to hope big. C. R. Snyder, a psychologist who studied hope for much of his career, described it as having both agency (the belief that you can move toward a goal) and pathways (the routes to get there). The first ten elements build the pathways. The eleventh is the agency. Together they make a hope that is neither naive nor afraid.
Dig this week
- Write your record. Write down three times something came to you that you did not think would come. Keep this list where you will see it.
- Write one rule for discouragement. For example: If I hear myself say “this will never happen,” then I will read my list of three answered expectations before I say anything else.
- Make room as if it is coming. Prepare one thing you will need on the day your expectation arrives. A room, a document, a dress, a savings line, a seat at your table.
Questions to ponder
- Which of your current expectations have truly passed through the other ten elements? Which have not?
- Is there an expectation you have quietly given up on? What would it take to dig one more ditch?
- Where in your life have you been saying “no” before God has?
- Can you recall a time when an answer came by a different road than you expected? What did you learn?
- Whose life is connected to your expectation? Who else is waiting for it to be fulfilled?
More questions for small groups are in the book.
Lord, I have done what you have shown me to do. Now I refuse to say no where you have not said it. Let there be a performance of the things you have spoken, in your way and in your time.
How ready are you for what you are expecting?
Score yourself on all eleven elements in about two minutes. You will see where to dig first.