Does Your Relationship With God, Match Your Expectations?

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Waterfall

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Personal relationships are usually described as a close bond or connection between people that are formed by emotional bonds or interactions. These bonds are often strengthened and grow through mutual experiences.
We are often told we can have a personal relationship with Jesus/God but it turns out to be like no other personal relationship with people......because, well, He's God and not people. We cannot see Him, hug or get hugged by Him and often we don't really hear him talking to us but search for a "sign" or interpretation of a deafening silence or even just wait for an answer to play out in our lives and interpret it as God's answer.

In your relationship with God, what do you believe you can rightfully expect from God within your relationship?

Are you ever disappointed with your relationship with God?
 
My relationship with God is that I’m a human being with a consciousness to contemplate these questions, and I exist within existence like every other living being. I’m not sure my relationship with God is more directly personal than. It was when I was a child and I was taught that it was (when I went to that day camp briefly, I prayed and my imagination was so strong I could almost have a two way conversation. I’ve told the story before...I didn’t go to church with my family.) I believe that imagination is something though! It’s not stupid or crazy. I don’t have that as strongly lately, except for moments when something happens and I get that sense God has heard me. I feel it when with other believers in church - that God is there with us. I’m one of a multitude of a greater whole. I don’t know that it is so personal. It’s not really like having an invisible friend, like a child. We can not have a unified world, perhaps, if God is each person’s best friend who understands them and their wishes only...there are 7 billion other people to be concerned about, too.

I may come back to this thread later after i’ve thought more about it. Good questions!


:)
 
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Trying to remember what my initial expectations were.

As for current expectations and how they shape relationship.

I do not expect that a relationship with God means easy street. Taking up your cross and following points more to calvary than party.

So suffering without suffering alone is an expectation.

Check. I am never alone.

Bonus. I am not in a constant state of suffering.

Purpose and meaning are found in service is an expectation.

Check. I do not suffer from lack of purpose or meaning.

Bonus. Some of the service is tremendously easy and enjoyable.
 
I am gratefully aware of God’s presence within and without me. That presence is subject to no definition. My intimate relationship with the presence of God has drawn me out of many meaningless attachments. It leads me day by day nearer to my eternal home.
 
God has supported and encouraged me through the diverse landscape of experience. My union with God is well expressed by traditional marriage vows: “For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health.”

An ancient poem well expresses my trust in God: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of death’s shadow, I fear no evil. For you are with me.”
 
"Just Pi Sin through" ... to gain some knowledge on the flat out land of the lie (learning experience) is a quote I wish as an epitaph!

It seems like Pi ... a rounded sense of reason that comes back at itself like a mental reflection. I've been told that love is nothing and that thought is nothing ... imagine an abstract individual creating such a domain to hide scattered physical enlightenment! That's diffusion suitable for dissemination ... but it we don;t understand Sem and Semite ... it is iconic loss ... symbolically!

Deep staff a cocked inclinations ... then there's the strep ti cocal as in that Irish Hard Shell Woman ... mole esque Ul ... you'll all get it in the end! Tis a rod or more deep ... stay posted ... like crow 'nd ... dark and enigmatic! Tisn't everything a mystery to those desiring to know not?

Thus great loss and loess ... fertile drt for the next cycle ...
 
Has anyone been disappointed in God followed by doubt because your expectations for how God could help didn't happen?
Did you continue to count on God to resolve the issue or take it upon yourself to fix it? Did it feel like God couldn't fix everything or just wouldn't?

How do you handle unanswered prayers?
 
Had a man express disappointment in God this morning ... after intense prayers for a friend that died by cancer ... shouldn't happen in their denomination ... or so it was said! Irregularities and irrationalities expand ... human thought is weak in organizing these far out sensationalism!
 
If there was a god of wisdom ... would that being exclude itself from the irrational side? Now that's bifurcation ... a form of segregation!

However all must take a dip ...
 
When you lose folks close to you well before their "threescore and ten" years you realise that God is rather limited in the control department.

Life has taught me that, on a personal level, the most I can hope from God is that God shares my life and supports me -whatever I do, wherever I go.

And I'm okay with that........
 
From OP -----Does Your Relationship With God, Match Your Expectations?

My expectations do match my personal relational with God as I fully believe in and put into practice the Promises of God laid out in His word -Our expectations come from what God has promised in His word -----Grace makes available to me all the Promises God sets out in His word and Faith and Trust when I put these into the right action brings me to expect manifestation of that promise in my lives -------

This is my view
 
I've been thinking of this one for a few days, and I've got nothing.

Given my 'beliefs' about Godde, and the total non-necessity for such beliefs (when you look at a rock, must you 'believe' it's a rock?; Godde is What Godde Is), my expectations are identical to my expectations about my life. Which is a never-ending mystery to me. I have intentions, I have plans; the Universe has control. Was I brought up with an expectation that the Universe would be fair? No. What has been given to me, in exactly ONE vision, was that "all is well, and all manner of things will be well", without words, though, and I have never been able to transform this revelation into anything believable to anyone but me (a deep faith in the Ultimate Benevolence of All at a Macro Level, which is not necessarily true at the micro level), and that, given my extreme tolerance for ambiguity, is probably just fine.

I'm answering because I feel that it's an answer one should have something for if one is the Lead of the Faith Formation & Christian Education Team in a church...
 
BetteTheRed said:
I've been thinking of this one for a few days, and I've got nothing.

Given my 'beliefs' about Godde, and the total non-necessity for such beliefs (when you look at a rock, must you 'believe' it's a rock?; Godde is What Godde Is), my expectations are identical to my expectations about my life. Which is a never-ending mystery to me. I have intentions, I have plans; the Universe has control. Was I brought up with an expectation that the Universe would be fair? No. What has been given to me, in exactly ONE vision, was that "all is well, and all manner of things will be well", without words, though, and I have never been able to transform this revelation into anything believable to anyone but me (a deep faith in the Ultimate Benevolence of All at a Macro Level, which is not necessarily true at the micro level), and that, given my extreme tolerance for ambiguity, is probably just fine.

I'm answering because I feel that it's an answer one should have something for if one is the Lead of the Faith Formation & Christian Education Team in a church...
Click to expand...
Now you've got me thinking...hmmmm
 
Lovely fellow who has been an off and on member of the "Tuesday Night Group" - he picks his series, and weeks - lovingly has a permanent 'grudge' against me, for nudging him from his certain theology. His wife, very rooted in UCCan tradition, is quite glad of this. Interesting relationships with uncertainty.
 
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