How do you manage expectations?

Look at the attentive expectation in the cat's eyes - expecting something, but what? Food? Attention? Love? It's easy to manage the expectations of a cat. You don't have to be an expert in the latest theories about 'Expectation Management'. What's that? It's management jargon defined on JARGON DATABASE.COM as

"A formal process to continuously capture, document, and maintain the content, dependencies, and sureness of the expectations for persons participating in an interaction, and to apply the information to make the interaction successful."

Well, you knew that didn't you? Let's KISS (old-fashioned management jargon for Keep It Simple Stupid). Back to the cat and her easy to manage expectations. But how do you manage your expectations of yourself? Or what other people expect of you? I think my upbringing (especially school) programmed me to expect too much of myself and to some extent of others. I've had to learn to be kind to myself and forgive myself and others for falling short and getting things wrong - after all God does.  Which brings me to the question, what does God expect of me? There could be several answers. The one that often springs to my mind is from the prophet Micah:

"to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6: 8)

The word that lit up my life today was posted by Sister Catherine Wybourne in a wise and compassionate post about Managing Expections. She writes about her own expectations of herself, what others expect of her as a Benedictine nun and ends with these words:

"What God wants is us, just as we are: poor, weak, wobbly and absolutely infuriating, always misunderstanding, backsliding and generally unsatisfactory. God is never disappointed in us, never put out by our failures, because no matter how often we get it wrong he still sees in us something we so often fail to register: “Christ lovely in limbs not his”. Praise him."

Thank you Sister Catherine. Do read her post in full - it's much better than this one.