Expectations

“Because you’re not what I would have you be, I blind myself to who, in truth, you are.”  Madeline L’Engle

There they are again, those pesky expectations.  It is, as L’Engle suggests, easy to write someone off as worthless because they don’t meet my personally created set of expectations as to how or what they should be.  The scene that comes to mind here is standing at the base of a vending machine, hungry or thirsty and wanting something inside it, but having no money.  (This image must be set in the days when vending machines did not take credit cards.)  I reach in the change dispensary hoping to get lucky, and find no change there, but instead find a wadded up $100 bill.  Still, I walk away hungry/thirsty, and or broke, because the machine doesn’t take $100 bills, so I just leave the bill where I found it.