Expectations About Poland

I returned Monday night from Poland. What a great experience. I had a lot of fun, met a lot of great people, and got to share my faith with youth from another country. I took lots of notes on the trip so you can expect the next few blogs to be about my experiences in Poland. Today, I wanted to share a little insight about expectations and assumptions.
My information gathering before the trip was through movies that were made and included the country and the people. This is a very flawed way to gather information, because the majority of those movies were set during World War II. That was over 60 years ago. A lot has changed during that time. My expectations were to get into Warsaw and have to go through several road blocks and be forced to show my documents. The only road block I encountered was when a man was crossing the street on a bicycle as our light turned green. Ok, I understood I was in Warsaw and it is a big city, so change was expected. In Warsaw, there was a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, and even a Kentucky Fried Chicken. People in Warsaw wore Nike shoes, long shorts and modern rock concert t-shirts just like the kids in the U.S. All the restaurants had air conditioning, the cars had air conditioning, you could get Diet Coke, regular Coke, PowerAde, and bottled water. I even had cell phone coverage. So far Warsaw had not met my World War II expectations.
The camp was held in a village town of Lochow. (It is not pronounced like it is spelled, unless you are Polish you will not get it) When my translators told me we were going to a village town I was excited. I got all my papers out and was ready to present them to soldiers at all the road blocks. As we drove from Warsaw we went into the country there were many forest, lined with trees, I was on the look-out for soldiers and paratroopers. I was disappointed as we arrive at Lochow, no soldiers, no roadblocks. I was so disappointed we had to stop at the local grocery store to get an ice cream sandwich. Once again, my expectations and assumptions never held true. Lochow was a very modern village as modern as any small town America. I even had cell phone coverage.
My first lesson learned in Poland- do not gather information from movies. Just kidding. The lesson learned is sometimes our expectations and assumptions are false, and we have to be open to learning and experiencing before draw a conclusion. Warsaw is a major city, why would it not be as modern as any other major city? Thank goodness God never gave up on us. We are human; we fail to meet expectations all the time. Sometimes we fail to meet God’s expectations, but he never stops loving us. We have to be open as well. We have to set high expectations and expect those around us to met them, and if they don’t we love them just the same.