A Pinch

Dennis Burton and Wayne Oakes helpfully describe what happens in a church where expectations are not met. According to their thesis, church families--indeed, ALL families--have certain expectations. Hopefully, these expectations are stated but more often than not, these expectations are not ever expressed. So we each carry around these expectations that the other people in our families (or our churches) must meet.

But we never tell them what they are.

Many of us are familiar with this idea from marriage. An example: An early conflict in my marriage with Kadie revolved around how we would conduct our early morning routine. I had grown accustomed to reading the paper every morning while I was in college. I enjoyed waking up early, eating cereal and sitting on the kitchen floor with the paper spread out before me. I would slowly and methodically read it all from A1 to F18 and enjoy every moment of it.

Kadie had grown up spending quality time together with her family every morning. She often looked forward to eating breakfast together as a family. So her (unstated) expectation was that we would eat our breakfast, gaze into one another’s eyes and talk (I guess that’s what she thought) throughout the breakfast hour. My expectation was that I would find a spot on the floor, spread the paper out and eat breakfast while tuning the rest of the world out for an hour or so.

Our expectations were certain not to be met.

Burton and Oakes call a broken expectation a “pinch”. Pinches aren’t fatal, but they are inevitable. Unfortunately they are often one sided. By that I mean that it is possible for only one person to feel pinched in a situation. In fact, that’s exactly what happened early in our marriage.

The first few days of our post-honeymoon time together, I got up as usual and read the paper while Kadie fixed a nice breakfast. I then ate the breakfast while I read the paper (yes, I’m an idiot, I know). Her feelings were hurt (pinched) and I had no idea that there was even a problem until later. She was pinched while I was oblivious.

It was only after we clearly expressed our expectations to one another that we could reach a mutual accommodation.

The irony is, fifteen years later, our mornings are so helter-skelter that we never take time to eat breakfast together.

And we haven’t had a newspaper subscription in years ;)

Tomorrow: My first pinch at Susan Song.