Good Friday

My mother sent me an e-mail a few years ago that was meant to be an encouragement to me after a conversation we had. She told me that, among other things too wonderful for me to have ever hoped to be, she saw me as "someone who is much too critical of himself, but perhaps does not expect enough from others." I have wondered a great deal about that, and whether or not that was a good thing. I think I have the answer, and if not, God will correct me.
I think it is both good and bad. As much as my words and actions do not seem to bear this out, at my core I know that the merciless standards I hold myself to are not good at all; moreover, they are not the least bit effective in bringing about the changes I need to make. At the same time, it's certainly better to expect too little of others than to hold them to the same draconian ideals I reserve for myself.
Let's be honest, mmkay? Oddly like Mussolini when he bragged that he made his own rules and didn't even keep them, I'm no better than anyone else at being consistent. I fudge and rationalise and make excuses; perhaps if my own standards are as inhuman as others claim that's sometimes all that keeps me alive. And like everyone else I am adept at judging and categorising and dismissing other people while holding myself outside the problem as if it had nothing at all in me, when all the while I am as much a part of it as the enemy himself.
Expectations have always gotten me into trouble. My own set me up for a seemingly endless and predictable string of disappointments with myself and others, those of other people are all too often bricks in the pitiless wall of my own standards that I keep hurling myself into. I need very much to learn to expect what should in fact be expected, not because it's natural or even comprehensible, but because it's real and true. Or rather, He is.
As I write this, it's about an hour and change past Good Friday, another term I've often wondered about. The term "good" as used here has always been puzzling, as it's attached to the name of the day set aside to commemorate the Son of God's death by torture, but again, that's natural expectations talking. It was good for us, because there was no other way to save us. It was good for Jesus, because He was fulfilling His Father's will. And in some inscrutable, scandalous way, it was good for God because He loves us enough to pay such a monstrous cost for us.
Make no mistake, I am not in the least deluded into thinking that he came out ahead in this deal because of our intrinsic worth. We don't have any. Dirt is cheap. Except that He blew the breath of life into some and got us. So all the worth we have is from Him. And that is the only fact that offers any hope for us to understand how the the day that marks the most infernal and horrendous act in human history can be called good.
My expectations of satanic triumph are dashed when I discover that he was playing right into God's hands when he spilled the blood of Christ. My expectations of life as it always was - bereft of real living - shatter when the cross is revealed as the gateway to Resurrection, first His, then ours, not only on the last day but a little each day until then. My expectations of despair and damnation wither before the inescapable fact that the God Who loved me enough to die for me knows full well that my bottomless failure is precisely what qualifies me to receive His unspeakable gift.
If I can really learn to expect what He has never once failed to come through with, all these crushing, stultifying false expectations will fall off like scales off a pair of long-blind eyes. That's His plan. That's His business. That is good. He is good. All the time.