Hope is a liquid thing, ready to assume whatever shape might hold it. It pours itself into tomorrow, never quite knowing what form tomorrow will take, never insistent on a particular volume or design. Hope is characterized by a constant humility, and because this is so it always finds a place to rest at the end of the day. Hope can camp in the field, lay itself down on the floor in a corner, or sit up all night watching the stars, and at each place find the good that is there.
Something happens as hope hardens into expectation, something like solidification. Freezing. Water becomes ice. It requires a particular receptacle before it can move on. Such firmness can be a good thing when it is used to organize corporate growth, but freezing can kill living cells. And relationships are more like living cells.
The personal investment that may attach itself to expectation is unlike the humility of hope. Expectation often insists on its rights. It likes ownership. It may easily give way to behaviors which are manipulative, intimidating, threatening, or which might otherwise control that which ought to be beyond control.
Hope waits. Hope may request or inquire. And it will flow into the future as surely as the stream tumbles down toward the sea. There always seems to be a place for liquids to go.
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But... what about *your* hope?
ReplyDeleteWhere there is real fire one will find light and heat. In this lifetime I have had the privilege of loving a few souls like this, and though I burn myself down to ash in that process there is, I think, something that resonates and radiates: my hope for their genuine prosperity, something far beyond what I can provide. It is manifest in the prayers and songs and tears no one sees, and in the joy that echoes across heaven's halls when I see them doing well...for I have been a father. And when God reached for a symbol to teach us something about His care, he chose this. "...for I have carried you the way a father carries his son..."
ReplyDelete"Expectations," is beautiful didatic poetry. When does one begin to hope? Is a baby born with hope or does it have expectations? Does liquid hope begin to flow into a person when they turn 8? or puberty? Is hope a right of passage until you have perfect knowledge? Persoanlly, I need liquid hope and loved reading how hope can be lost to expectations. There is a deeper message in this poem than a simple reader like me can understand, but the comparisons are crystal clear.
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