Expectations

MON., MAR. 29, 1999, 12:09 PM
OFFICE, PULLIAM

This is an interesting time – in your life, in the “working” of your culture and those like it around the earth, and in your church year. In regard to the latter you are in the last week of Lent, in Holy Week, the remembrance of My last week as Jesus, these many years ago. It is now after the triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, remembered as Palm Sunday. Now, presumably, I, as Jesus, am teaching and preaching in ways that will disturb and inflame the Jewish leaders. Thus I am setting the stage for a confrontation in the Garden, so that I will be arrested, tried, and convicted of… being too dangerous a disturber. There’s not much written about this week, but it is a time when some of the people had expectations about Me as the Messiah, while I had counter expectations about sacrificing My young life.

In your culture this is the last year of this century, one marked by the development of computers (in the second half of this 100 year stretch) and the full reliance on them. There has been the expectation that computers would simplify life, make it more efficient, and be quite a special boon to human well-being. It certainly can be argued that this has happened, and that the developed world is better off because of this electronic “servant.”

And then there is the Y2K expectations… that computers that are date oriented will not know what to do when 99 becomes 00. You’re not quite sure why there are such fears, but those who know way more than you do about “modern life” are predicting more or less chaos. You assume that you are in as favorable a place as you can be (except, perhaps, that this possible “malfunction” will occur in the winter season). You expect to be adversely affected in some ways, but in no ways that are life threatening.

I call on you to see it as a test of the spirit of your nation, and this is moderately frightening. Will most of you remain calm and expectant in the face of hardships or will there be strife encouraged by what actually happens to and with a vaunted, modern, system? You truly don’t know what expectations to have, but you are preparing in some small ways for financial problems.

I have told you often, and in some variety of ways, that the human population is even now excessive and that “modern life” and “life-style expectations” cannot be sustained much longer. Hence I am not greatly disturbed about what can happen as the next century “dawns.” If some of your culture’s excessive expectations cannot be met this may be good, in the big picture of the new millennium. It just will be difficult to return to a more sustainable balance without hardship, including normally unexpected deaths.

For example, it is predicted that many hospitals will not be able to function as expected, with all that computers and “chips” do to insure life-sustaining, life-saving care. In your culture, at this time, more people die in hospitals than in any other single setting. What about this “near-future”? For awhile the hospital may lose its image as the place for life-saving.

And what of your expectations in this new season of Spring… you personally? First and foremost, you expect to continue to hear Me, Holy Spirit, and to record such in this quite non-electronic way. You expect to live another… what is it?… five or six years. Between now and “that time” you hope for no crises where you’ll have to opt for major or invasive medical care (though by next year such may not be as available as now). You expect to live out these years in basically good health, even as you will have additional “losses.” You expect to take time to appreciate the facets of your life, major and minor. You expect to maintain quite a positive perception of life, focusing on what you have rather than what you have lost or never had.