Expectations

My mother was a teacher and a really good teacher. As a teenager myself I knew some of her students as friends, and they loved and respected her. As she grew older and more tired, however, she became gradually more negative, jaded by the endless demands of the job. She stopped enjoying teaching, with all its myriad challenges, and found the frustrations more overwhelming. The children became tougher to teach, sensing her changing attitude I’m sure, so as a result her final years until retirement were tricky.

I was reminded of her experience with this story which I was told recently:

‘I was standing at a crossroads when a man came to me and said, ‘Can you tell me what it’s like in that village up ahead? I asked him what it had been like in the village through which he’d passed. He said it had been a dreadful place. I said, ‘You’ll find the next place like the last.’ 
As soon as he was gone, another man came by. He too asked if the place ahead was a good place in which to stay. I asked him what it had been like in the village through which he’d passed. He said it had been quite wonderful. I said, ‘You’ll find the next place just like the last.’

The novelist Isabel Allende wrote: “We only have what we give”, a sentiment echoed by the great Christian thinker, Thomas Aquinas: “You get what you give, and what you give determines what you get back. There is no other option for it.” 

It’s often tempting to criticise a village, a group of people or an individual, sometimes with good cause; but, if we approach people with an open hand and mind, we so often find our warmth or generosity responded to richly with matching grace and kindness.

Revd Kate McFarlane