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Phillip Yancey On Expectations And ...
Contributed by Sermon Central on May 1, 2010 (message contributor)
Phillip Yancey on Expectations and Disappointment
Phillip Yancey had this to say about people’s expectations:
Daniel Boorstin, former librarian of Congress and director of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, offers this assessment of contemporary culture:
When we pick up our Newspaper at breakfast, we expect-we even demand-that it bring us momentous events since the night before. We turn on the car radio as we drive to work and expect “news” to have occurred since the morning newspaper went to press. Returning in the evening, we expect our house not only to shelter us , to keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, but to relax us, to dignify us, to encompass us with soft music and interesting hobbies, to be a playground, a theatre, and a bar. We expect our two-week vacation to be romantic, exotic, cheap and effortless. We expect a far-away atmosphere if we go to a near-by place; and we expect everything to be relaxing, sanitary, and Americanized if we go to a far-away place. We expect new heroes every season, a literary masterpiece every month, a dramatic spectacular every week, a rare sensation every night. We expect everybody to feel free to disagree, yet we expect everybody to be loyal, not to rock the boat or take the Fifth Amendment. We expect everybody to believe deeply in his religion, yet not to think less of others for not believing. We expect our nation to be strong and great and vast and varied and prepared for every challenge; yet we expect our ‘national purpose’ to be clear and simple, something that gives direction to the lives of two hundred million people and yet can be bought in a paperback at the corner drugstore for a dollar.
We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for ‘excellence’ to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy. We expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly, to go to the “church of our choice” and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God.
Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed.
Phillip Yancey, Finding God in Unexpected Places (pages 187-188)
From a srmon by Michael McCartney, Want vs Need, 2/26/2010
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