Friends, you can pray for me today. I am about to run a workshop for our freshman students on expectations. I found myself preparing for it by googling: “managing expectations,” and thought to myself, I should not be allowed to teach on this!

Hopefully it is fun; I included funny pictures and video clips and am going to talk about my addictions to carbs and perfection. I’m quoting Brené Brown a lot obviously, and telling funny stories of when I was a student (not that long ago!).

I learned a lot from it, and ultimately need to preach to myself what I will be presenting to them.

Here are a few of those things:

Priorities are important. Determine what matters to you, and focus on those things. Choose a few things, or just one thing, and be really really good at that. If you try to be everything and do everything well, you probably won’t be able to. Honor God with the tasks He has given you specifically.

Don’t “hustle for your worthiness.” (This is where Brené comes in.) In her newest book Rising Strong she talks about our “inner hustler.” We believe that we have to achieve in order to prove that we are worthy of love. We try and try and try in order to achieve love and value. We don’t need to do that. Jesus died so we don’t have to do that. All we need to worry about is living for Him and His Kingdom.

I also learned that expectations are strangely similar to hope or faith. My definition for expectations that I found is, “a strong belief that something will happen or be the case in the future.” Tell me that isn’t faith. We believe, strongly, that Jesus loves us and is coming back for us. Without that expectation our faith is nothing. We hope, we long, we wait expectantly, for our reunion with our Lord.

Ultimately, my message for them, and you, is to give yourself GRACE. God does not hold us to an unreachable standard, He holds us to a standard of grace. He has already paid the price; He has already declared us loved. Now, listen to my new favorite song, and soak in the words, “Your Love is proud to be seen with me.”