You often hear that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who see the glass half empty and those who see the glass half full. I think a better way to look at it is that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who plan vacations and those who take vacations that others plan for them.

I myself am a planner. I plan to plan. I’m that guy. When planning a vacation, I make a folder with color coded files that include, but aren’t limited to: airport terminal maps, driving directions, places to eat, walking tours, an alphabetical listing of important phone numbers and a checklist so I don’t forget to do anything.

Of course, this compulsive need to plan bleeds over into my everyday life as well. Most nights, I make an impossibly long to-do list for the next day. Each item is numbered and often contains bulleted sub-sections. Usually by around 10:30 am it becomes perfectly clear that the day’s list has no hope of being accomplished.

I may (read: definitely) take planning to the extreme, but am I really alone? How many of us had a pretty good idea of how life would work out? We’ve had expectations heaped on us from birth. Society, our parents, our church, family and friends often just the unrelenting force of this is how it’s always been lead us to see no other way. Success in life is clearly defined and we set out with a color-coded folder telling us how to get there.

For many people, life is about achieving a goal and checking off certain items along the way.

This can be a exhausting way to live, can’t it? Essentially, we become slaves to expectations. And worse yet, we’re doomed to failure from the very start. One phone call wrecks that intricately planned out daily to-do list. Or one late flight or traffic jam means we’ll never make it to the hotel in time to change, to make the cab, to make the dinner, to make the…well, you get the idea. Life has a way of completely interrupting our expected journey.

There’s a counterintuitive way to look at these interruptions however that see them not as roadblocks to our expected destination, but as detours to an awesome place we never even knew existed.

Nobody in history has mastered the counterintuitive like Jesus. In his uber spiritual-mystical-completely amazing-but totally confusing way, Jesus threw out sayings like

The last will be first and the first will be last.

and

Whoever loses their life will find it.

Jesus ate with sinners, talked to the woman at the well, healed on the sabbath and had the audacity to be a poor carpenter’s son from Nazareth.

Jesus was not a slave to expectations.

The funny thing about expectations is that as much as we seem compelled to live by them, we instantly recognize and celebrate those times when we step outside our comfort zone or off the beaten path.

I guess for some people, Applebee’s is their favorite restaurant. Most people though, when asked, will name some little hole-in-the-wall place in an old gas station, or a deserted strip mall, or tucked so far off the main road that your GPS can’t even find it. Where I live, people will pass four Pizza Huts to get to Big Ed’s Pizza. Who hasn’t heard someone say something like, “It doesn’t look like much from the outside, but it has the best hamburger you’ll ever eat”?

Or, take romantic comedies (please). The guy spends the whole movie foolishly chasing after the most beautiful girl in school. The entire time he’s confiding in his bespectacled, nerdy, unattractive best female friend while we are yelling at the screen because we know what he doesn’t. We see beyond his expectations. Only at the end does he realize that she is the one he loved all along. (Of course, in true guy fashion, it takes her removing her glasses and fixing her hair for him to realize this.)

I had a friend tell me recently that she had an expectation for how everything should go, for various reasons, but she has felt more like herself, more real since she let all that go and just simply lived.

That is my challenge. To live a beautiful, counterintuitive life that doesn’t judge a book by it’s cover, that’s isn’t a slave to expectations, driving headlong towards a predetermined goal. But rather a life that sees every detour, every interaction, every moment as a new opportunity to

take a leap of faith
get outside my comfort zone
stop worrying
stop stressing
stop planning
and just simply live.

The glass may be half empty, but what’s it full of?