Do we have unrealistic expectations for our faith in God? Putting your faith in the will of God means accepting his plan for your life. Sometimes the spiritual journey that God lays out before you if filled with challenges and trials. Are you willing to accept the path that God puts you on?

When I was younger, I always thought that the closer to God you were, the better your life would be. If you were faithful, you would be blessed with a lot of stuff and your life would be nearly trouble free. When something went wrong, all you had to do is pray to God, and he would take away your struggle. If your problem persisted, you were probably not being good enough. You might not even have been praying hard enough.

After many years of this mindset, I finally started getting rid of my unrealistic expectations of what a spiritual journey is. Unrealistic expectations made God a genie in a bottle instead of a God. Instead of trusting God's will, I tried to tell him what I thought was best for my life. One of the hardest things to do was to accept that being human and living a Christian life was going to be filled with its challenges.

James 1:2-4 NASB Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Unrealistic expectations lead to unwanted results.

When getting our eyes set on an objective, it is hard to let go. In our mind, we envision what the situation should look like and how the outcome is supposed to be. When we look through the thing in God's eyes, we see the things we miss along the way.

Unrealistic expectations help us find sorrow and disappointment in the results of our journey. We look at our failed expectations as stumbling blocks instead of stepping stones that build a solid foundation in our life. Through our trials, we should find comfort, not disappointment. God uses our struggles to make us into the person that he wants us to be.
When we quit fighting the outcome and accept it as his will, we will find happiness in our life. God's glory will shine in every situation, no matter how dark it seems at the time.