April. Warm sun, soft fluffy clouds, grass turning green, puppies playing in the yard, flowers popping out, barefoot children dreaming of summer just around the corner, put away the snow shovel, get out the BBQ…. NOT SO MUCH! At least not in Gunnison, Colorado.
One of the things that I have had to get used to here in Central Colorado, is the fact that April is almost always an absolutely hideous month weather-wise. March is actually pretty pleasant for the most part. It warms up, it is pretty sunny, the snow melts out of the valley, and things look good. But come April, it snows a lot, the wind howls, and the skies are gray. You get enough of a taste of Spring in March to really start to crave the warm weather, then wham–April comes in like a lion, and often goes out like, well, a lion!
For the first few years that we lived here this whole thing bothered me a lot. But I discovered a simple solution to April, one that has made it quite tolerable for me. This same solution seems to work when applied to many areas of life that could otherwise bring disappointment or discouragement. I have found that God will give me this same instruction most of the time when I am griping about, I mean praying over, an ongoing problem with either a person or a situation. Want to know what the magic key is? Here it is; when I gripe, most of the time my loving Heavenly Father tells me to “change my expectations.”
But wait, I didn’t go into prayer to have the Lord talk to me about my expectations. I wanted Him to either fix the problem by changing the situation, making it go away, turning a person’s heart a different direction, or showing me what steps to take to fix the problem. But no, almost without fail, He addresses my attitude, and specifically my expectations of the person or thing that I am seeing as a problem. You know what else I have discovered? It works. Most of the time, if I continue to seek Him, He will show me where my expectations have gotten off track.
Often, especially when dealing with people, I find that I have begun to expect something of them that they are simply not able to do at this point in their lives. Most of the time, I didn’t ever consciously decide to expect a person to act a certain way, or take a certain responsibility, expectations just sneak up on me. This is not to say that there are not appropriate standards by which all of us should treat one another, or that we shouldn’t have expectations of each other. But we have to remember that we are all works in progress. Galatians 6:5 in the Amplified Bible says that, “each of us have to bear our own little load of oppressive faults.” That just means that I know that I disappoint plenty of people with my shortcomings, and if I am going to live with and love people, then I will be disappointed from time to time too. Many times, the only reason that I feel disappointment is because my expectations were out of line in the first place.
So the Lord will show me how to change my expectations and in doing so to find peace again with both God and man. Once this is done, life is good, and I can once again enjoy people and things for what they are, and enjoy the process of growth in all things. And as for April, once in a while it surprises me. But on days like last Monday, when the snow is flying sideways outside my window, I know that April snow does make for beautiful July flowers in the mountains. I know that this extended winter is what makes our summers so sweet. April is what April is, and I have learned to appreciate it for its own special little set of blessings.
