Woody Allen famously said that 80 percent of life is just showing up. He was talking about the big plans that people make but never actually get around to initiating, like writing a book, starting a business, learning a language, or whatever other endeavor they had written in their middle-school diaries or personality type quizzes. For those people who want to hold elected office, 80% of the work is actually putting together a campaign. You know, showing up.
So when you actually do “show up” and things don’t go the way you hoped, the sting is especially deep. Such is the sting of unmet expectations, and it is the cause of so much of our daily frustration and misery. Those involved in work that has a public element to it, like writing, preaching, and teaching, face the blight of unmet expectations whenever we invest our time and energy into a sermon, a lecture, article, or book, and the response is less than resounding. Think of the common story about how many publishers turned down a young writer before her first great work is finally accepted for print (I recently heard Camille Paglia’s account of this modern day type-story). Or think about the times when a preacher pours his heart out to the congregation only the be greeted afterwards with a polite “Thank you” and glad-handed “Great sermon!” Little do congregations know that these well-meaning responses reveal a not-so-subtle absence of effect. You showed up, but nobody cares.
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