As most students know, Revive is a student-led worship service that takes place on Mondays at 7 p.m. in the chapel. However, January’s last Revive service was quite different due to Christian Emphasis Week also occurring that same week. Grace Thornton, our guest speaker for Christian Emphasis Week, spoke at Revive on Monday, Jan. 22.
Originally from Mississippi and raised in church, Thornton graduated from Mississippi College. A few years after graduating, Thornton moved to Alabama. Blogger and author of I Don’t Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God’s Adventure for You, Thorton opened Revive by telling two stories.
The first story was about Thornton’s friend and her friend’s four-year-old daughter going on a trip to Disney World. Thornton explained how her friend and her friend’s daughter had all these expectations and how Disney World blew said expectations away; before they went home, they both cried because they didn’t want to leave. Then, Thornton told a second story about when she visited Paris.
She explained that, similar to her friend going to Disney World for the first time, she had massive expectations about what Paris would be like (spoiler alert, she said the best part is the food!). Paris wasn’t exactly what she expected it to be; it wasn’t bad, per se. It just wasn’t what she expected. The city was sort of dirty and crowded, but going there was still a really exciting experience. Her next thought connected the pieces of her two stories together. These expectations are small examples of how we, as humans, imagine what our entire lives will look like.
When she was 16, Thornton got her purity ring from her church. She remembered how the ring started off as a symbol of waiting until marriage. “I didn’t realize it then,” Thornton began, holding up her purity ring, “but this ring came with all sorts of expectations. It was a symbol of the expectation that I would get married; I was expecting the day I would eventually take this ring off and replace it with an engagement or wedding ring.”
After Thornton graduated college, a guy friend confessed that he wanted to take things further between the two of them. They began dating and, for a while, things were great. Then, in her early twenties, Thornton felt like things began to spiral out of her control. Her relationship wasn’t working out the way she expected it to; the job opportunities weren’t lining up the way she expected.
“Until then,” Thornton explained, “I had never been in a place that wasn’t going up, leading me to where I thought God wanted me to be.” What do we do when our lifelong expectations don’t work out the way we want them to? This is when Thornton began wrestling with the idea of who God is. What did I do wrong, is God not who I thought He was?, Thorton began wondering.
Around this time, Thornton began surrounding herself with a different type of Christian than she had ever seen. Since she was little, Thornton has been surrounded by what she considered were two different types of Christians – the first type were those who she could tell were Christians who lacked passion for God and the second type were those who said they were Christians but showed no evidence of that through the way they lived. These new people she surrounded herself with during this period in her life were a third type of Christian – they were people who loved God for exactly who He is without any expectations about what He would do for them.
Things clicked at that moment for Thornton. She realized she was doing the “Christian thing” all wrong. Putting our expectations on God isn’t he right way of going about our walk with God. Thornton stressed that He wants us to come to Him with no expectations at all. She quickly explained that this is different than low expectations. Having low expectations is being pessimistic and not getting our hopes up in order to protect ourselves from disappointments. “God has it rigged for us to know Him better even if that means that our lives don’t play out the way we expect them to,” she explained.
If we trust him with our blank slates, our lives, He can and will write us better stories than we could ever write for ourselves. “If you could have your life play out exactly the way you think you want it to, would it be better than the life God wants to write you so you know Him better?” she asked us. The answer is no.
Jeremiah 29:11 (‘For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’) is a verse most of us know by heart. Thornton admitted that she used to see this verse through the filter of her expectations. God is going to give me a husband, He’s going to give me kids, He’s going to let me go into the missions’ field, she thought.
Instead of looking at this verse through the filters of our expectations, Thornton explained that she thinks we ought to look at this verse as a tribute to God’s faithfulness. He will always do what’s best for us, even if it is not what we expect, if we give all of ourselves to Him.
Thornton, after letting go of her expectations, began reading the Bible to get to know God better. When she began rereading the Bible, it ignited a passion in her that she compared to running. “The more you run, the more you love it,” she stated, “but that you have to train yourself to be able to run, longer, harder, faster.” She had to learn discipline, a necessary skill in life, to train herself to read more and more of the Bible every day.
She encouraged us to pray a simple prayer everyday to help teach our hearts to love God more than anything else: “God, I love you more than whatever the thing it is that I love most.” That night, the room fell silent as many a Judson girl prayed that prayer. It was the kind of silence that only God can bring, the kind of silence that was so pure someone could have heard the drop of a pin. It was the kind of silence that changes hearts.