Looking up Zapata Falls, Colorado
There are a few national parks that have been a disappointment to me. To others, they are the best-of-the-best, but I found them a disappointment. The problem was that I was looking for something else in them – I wasn’t looking for what they offered; I was looking for something different. And since they didn’t deliver on my expectations, I was disappointed.
For whatever reason, this is not my mental image of the Rockies. Photo from Chiquita Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
For example, visiting Rocky Mountain National Park, I expected to find the best of the Rocky Mountains. I had images of the peaks around Aspen and Buena Vista; jagged points and 14,000ft. peaks, alpine meadows and ridgelines. What I found was the Rockies, but it didn’t exactly look like Aspen – and there’s only one 14er in the park (Long’s Peak). And so I was disappointed. Is there anything wrong with Rocky Mountain National Park? No. It’s exactly the way it was created to be. What was wrong was my own expectations. I wanted the park to deliver something it was never designed to be.
That all said, this view from Hallett Peak is pretty good. Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
The same thing happened to me in Capitol Reef National Park. I thought of Arches National Park, Canyonlands, and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. What I found was quite different. I felt I had been let down somehow; that the scenery wasn’t up to snuff of the other parks. But the reality is that Capitol Reef isn’t Canyonlands. It never was, and it never will be. That’s not how God designed it to be.
Very nice, but not quite Canyonlands. Brimhall Arch in Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
In our own lives, we are disappointed by things that don’t live up to our expectations. Sometimes there is a good reason to be disappointed, but often, it’s our own expectations that are wrong, not the person or the thing or the place we are disappointed with – we set an expectation, but they were never created (or chose not) to match what we expected.
Views over Canyonlands from Grand View Point, Utah
It seems it might be better to have no expectations than to be constantly disappointed. Having personally known people who had very little expectation, I can say it’s not a happy place to live. We were created to dream, to expect, to look ahead – and without it, there’s very little to live for. Also, without expectations, it’s impossible to plan ahead, and the lack of expectation in the wilderness can mean the difference between being prepared and finding yourself in a desperate situation that could have been avoided if only you’d had expectations enough to prepare for them.
Slide Creek Falls along the Slide Creek Trail in the wilds of the Wind River Mountains, Wyoming
I am finding – both in life and in expeditions into the wilderness – that instead of not having expectations, it is better to give grace to the people, situations, and environments around me. Instead of trying to form them into the mold my expectations require, to realize that they have been created in a different mold; they were made differently than I expected. It requires acceptance of who and what they were created to be – or what they have become through their own choices – and it requires humility to lay down what we expected to be or to happen and extend them the grace to be who they are, or what they are.
The Causeway in the Flat Tops Wilderness of Colorado
But the ability to give grace has untold benefits. First, it brings peace in your own heart, because you can settle the restlessness that comes from the disparity that comes from expectation vs. reality. Second, it brings the reality that they can be who God created them to be without us trying to control them into what we think God has called them to be. Overall, it just makes for a much more peaceful, more life-giving experience of life.
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