Great Expectations
As a kid, I was told I could have perfect health and abundant riches...if I just believed.
The cult I grew up in, a splinter group of The Way International (TWI), believed in the health and wealth gospel. They called it abundant living after John 10:10:
“I am come that they might have life and that they might live it more abundantly.”
New members of TWI were expected to take a class called Power for Abundant Living. (The splinter group I grew up in repackaged the class as Walking in God’s Power.) The basic idea was that the Bible is full of promises for healing, financial prosperity, and an overall abundant life. All a person had to do is believe, and God would do what he promised.
Some adults thought their own failure to see an abundant life was due to old mental programming that got in the way of really believing. The expectations for us who had been taught from birth were huge.
Despite this special knowledge, our lives weren’t any better than other people I knew. In my family, I got a reputation as “the sick one” because I was plagued by seasonal allergies and ear and sinus infections. I spent so many days trying to believe the drippy nose, watery eyes, and pain away. After all, it was supposed to only take faith as small as a mustard seed.
God’s promises were supposed to extend to all of life, including financial prosperity. But my family seemed about the same (or even worse off) than most other families I knew, and I was often jealous of the newer clothes and spending money other kids had.
Still, confirmation bias is strong. For years, I assumed that any good thing that happened to anyone in our group was because they believed God’s promises. Sometimes a mild cold would seem like evidence I’d finally believed enough because I didn’t get really sick. I held on to the idea that the abundant life we had been promised was just around the corner, and that soon I would have the ability to really believe those promises.
These expectations came crashing down when one of my own children had bigger health struggles than I ever had. At six weeks old, she had eczema so severe I would find her rubbing her arms on her car seat straps until they bled. Introducing new foods was a whole ordeal with Epi Pen, Benadryl, and my phone at the ready in case of severe allergic reaction.
I was absolutely praying and believing for her to be healed every single day. And every single day she continued to suffer added another layer of guilt to my shoulders. Guilt that despite being part of this generation raised in the Word, I could never believe enough to heal my own child.
The fall from those high hopes of healing and abundant life was a hard one. Realizing you don’t actually have any special knowledge about life is humbling and scary. I am not any better or different from anyone else bumbling through life. I have no protection from life’s uncertainty.
Now I cringe at the word abundance, despite its current popularity. When I hear sayings like “good things are coming” or “the best is yet to come,” I think, You don’t know that! It’s easy for me to expect the worst, assuming life never works out or something bad might happen any minute now that I’m no longer guaranteed anything good.
It took me a while to recognize how I’d swung from one side of the pendulum to the other. I’m trying to settle in the middle. I wrote out a list of all the things in my life that actually have worked out to prove to myself that life does go right some of the time. I’ve been telling myself that my past has both good and bad, so the future is likely to contain a mix as well. In other words, at least a few good things probably are coming.
Sometimes I miss the time when I still truly believed God would heal anything and there was nothing to worry about. I miss that hope of finally realizing an abundant life. I don’t miss the weight those expectations placed on my generation. More than anything, I’ve gained a new contentment with the life that I have and all its ups, downs, and uncertainties.