Hoping Without Expectation

“Only the Lord is perfect. Look to God as the source of all you want to see happen in your marriage, and don’t worry about how it will happen. It’s your responsibility to pray. It is God’s job to answer. Leave it in His hands.” – Stormie OMartian, Power of a Praying Wife

“… suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” – Romans 5:3-5

Let’s say there are ways you wish your husband could change. There are two potential responses: one, you keep the hope alive. You think about it and try to help, but if change doesn’t happen, it’s easy to fall into malcontent or nagging. Or two, you give up any expectation he can change. You don’t put pressure on him or think on it much, but it’s easy to fall into apathy, or deadlier yet, disengagement or disgust.

How does one take a third, middle path—maintain a desire and vision for change, actively support and think for his best, yet let go of any timetable or ultimatum for how and when it happens, or whether it happens at all? How does one hope without expectation?

This is a question I think about for myself and my friends, because almost every marriage seems to have areas like this. Maybe it’s how he could speak more affirming words, lose weight, work less, be more involved in parenting, fight differently, relate sexually in a more fulfilling way, communicate more: these aren’t minor things, but deeply-rooted issues that often lead to either apathetic disengagement or nagging criticism, both of which shut off change, leading to a bad cycle. And it’s hard. When you’ve asked, and tried to help, but no change happens—when this occurs over years and years—then it’s hard to keep hoping.

I think the key to hoping without expectation for me lies in loving Dave first, then hoping for him second. In other words, my hope for him is a form of my love for him, and it is hope for him, not hope in him. My hope is in God, and this is not some kind of crutch: this is in fact the only way I am able to test and sustain my hopes for Dave, the only way I can hope at all in the right way, in a way that leads to life and not death, in a way that frees me from concrete outcomes or timetables.

One thing this means is that I examine my hopes for him. Why do I want him to change—is it for his best, for our best, or for selfish or superficial reasons? Dave is God’s son eternally and only my husband temporarily—is this a hope that God would want for him? Would it lead to God’s glory or fit him better for eternity? If this is a hope that relates to a need that I have in our marriage, which is certainly okay—am I willing to lay myself down in this area and love him unconditionally first?

Another thing this means is that I ought to pray for him, more than I analyze or act or anything else. Ultimately my expectation is not in Dave but in God, that he is able to work this change in Dave, or not, in his sovereignty and provision for me and for us, and that his timing is perfect. It’s like that saying: weak faith in a strong object is better than strong faith in a weak object. Better that I pray even if I barely believe God can do it, than heap up all my beliefs and expectations in Dave himself. Am I willing to do what it takes—to pray consistently for Dave, and ask God to strengthen my faith to keep doing so?

I have always liked that verse in Romans, because the end of that progression seems like such a non-sequitur. This hope Paul describes does not follow blissful breakthrough or an obvious trajectory of progress. This hope follows a suffering that lasts so long or goes so deep that one must learn endurance to a degree that it changes one’s very character. Why would this kind of suffering produce hope? Perhaps because it drives us to a deeper faith and knowledge of God, a God does not miserly mete out, but pours, his love into our hearts, into the seat of our emotions and minds and beings. This kind of God will withhold no good thing, will provide all that we need at the right time. This kind of God allows us to hope extravagantly and without shame, even in the midst of difficult circumstances.