The Garden of Gold
When Reality Doesn't Meet Our Expectations
Years ago, when my oldest daughter was two years old, she had an uncanny ability to wake before dawn. More often than I cared to count, she would pad into the living room while the rest of the house still slept, asking to watch her favorite cartoon, Nature Cat. Half awake, I would join her on the couch as the familiar episodes played for what felt like the thousandth time.
One episode in particular, “Gardens of Gold,” still stands out.1
In it, the characters set off in search of a legendary garden they’ve heard to be overflowing with gold. They sing about the “sparkly gold as far as eyes can see” and dream of “endless riches for you and me.” But when they finally arrive, they discover that the treasure isn’t gold at all. It’s actually a field of golden-hued flowers.
The disappointment is almost comical. Every time we watched it, my daughter would furrow her little brow and say, “Daddy, they so sad.”
I’ve thought about that scene for almost a decade. Not because of the cartoon itself, but because I know what it feels like to arrive at a garden expecting gold.
Mine happened to be in East Africa.
I imagined that life there would finally become the life I’d always wanted. I would know God more deeply. My struggles would lose their grip. Every sacrifice would feel meaningful. Adventure would replace ordinary life. People would come to Christ, and somehow that would quiet my restlessness. God would be pleased with me. Perhaps I’d never come home.
Looking back, I wasn’t simply longing to become an effective missionary. I was asking missionary service to become something it was never meant to be.
I had wrapped so much hope around the act of going that I could no longer distinguish God’s calling from my own expectations. Without realizing it, I had already decided what the good life ought to look like. The garden had to contain gold.
The Garden I Found
East Africa turned out to be far better than I could have asked for. It was so much better, in fact, that I almost couldn’t handle it.
When the life I had envisioned failed to materialize, I came dangerously close to despising it. It didn’t matter that God was giving me something better. I couldn’t see it because it wasn’t what I had come looking for.
My teammate was very different from me and often seemed more effective. My days moved more slowly than I had wanted. My struggles with sin hadn’t disappeared. Even participating in seeing many people come to Christ failed to satisfy the deepest ache inside me.
Looking back now, I can see what God was doing.
He was exposing how desperately I needed other people. He was moving me beyond a discipleship built primarily on knowledge. He was teaching me to embrace weakness instead of competence, stillness instead of constant productivity. Most of all, he was gently revealing that not even meaningful ministry could bear the weight of my soul’s needs.
But I couldn’t yet recognize those gifts. I was too busy grieving the life I thought God had promised me.
Without realizing it, I had written my script before I ever boarded the plane to Africa. And I had expected God to follow it instead of inviting me into his.
Reality—even though it was better than my expectations—felt crushing.
Every day presented the same choice: cling to the garden I had pictured, or learn to receive the one God had actually given me.
Expectations and Expectancy
It has taken me years to realize that the problem wasn’t hope. Nor was it desire. It wasn’t even dreaming about what God might do.
After all, none of us follows Jesus without expectation of some kind. We cannot help picturing what obedience might look like. Every invitation from God awakens our imagination. We begin to picture the places we’ll go, the people we’ll meet, and the ways our lives might unfold.
The problem begins when those imagined futures unknowingly become demands.
For years, I told missionary candidates and aspiring pastors, “Don’t have expectations.” I understand now that it wasn’t very good advice. Telling someone not to have expectations is a little like telling them not to dream at night. It’s simply part of being human. The better question is what kind of hope we carry into God’s mission.
Over time, I’ve come to distinguish between expectations and expectancy.
Expectations decide ahead of time what the good life will look like.
Expectancy remains eager without insisting.
Expectations say, This is how God will work.
Expectancy says, I can’t wait to see how God works.
Expectations reach for a particular outcome.
Expectancy simply keeps its hands open.
That was the kind of hope that first drew me toward God’s mission. I lay awake at night imagining the kingdom of God reaching places where Christ was scarcely known. Idealistic? Certainly. But also full of faith.
Somehow along the way, however, it hardened into expectations. And like most expectations, I didn’t even know I had them until they weren’t met.
True Gold
James, the brother of Jesus, eventually learned to hold the future with open hands. He writes:
“Now listen, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’” (James 4:13–15)
James isn’t condemning plans. He’s exposing our tendency to mistake them for promises.
That is the subtle danger of expectations. They begin as ordinary hopes but slowly harden into assumptions about what God owes us. And when he writes a different story, we often end up more than just confused. Our disappointment—because it is ultimately toward him—can become distrust.
Of course, the illusive garden of gold is rarely confined to missionary service. Sometimes it is the ministry we expected to have. The marriage we thought would grow. The career we believed would be meaningful. The family we hoped to build. Even the version of ourselves we expected God to produce.
The tragedy isn’t that these desires are wrong. It’s that they become too small.
Jesus never promised to give us the life we would have chosen for ourselves. He promised something better: himself. That is why he could say, “Whoever loses their life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). The life we discover in Jesus is not the one we secure by clinging to our expectations, but the one we learn to receive with open hands.
Looking back, I don’t regret the garden of gold I imagined. It led me to the better garden God had already prepared.
The flowers were never the disappointment. My expectations were.
Jesus was the treasure all along.2
PBS Kids, “The Gardens of Gold,” YouTube (21 March 2017)
This essay is adapted from an article originally published by Upstream Collective.