Tag Hope

Hope vs. Trust

normanjameson Leave a comment

I love grass.

Not the kind you smoke, the kind you mow.

The kind you walk through barefoot, even better when it’s wet, that transmits through your toes memories of being five. The green carpet you admire from your porch, and your neighbors view with jealousy from across the street.

The kind little kids roll in when there is the least little tilt in the yard and they can flop down, twist their left hip over their right and roll toward the sidewalk, or the creek, or that pile of dog doo Fido left in your yard.

Lush, soft, green spring grass that’s an emerald mattress, teasing, welcoming you to drop to your back and identify cloud animals.

In the spring, squeeze a blade between your fingers, or gnaw it between your teeth and the cellulose blades give up a spot of juice.  Then, it seems overnight, spring turns to summer and those luscious, virile, vibrant blades turn brown and brittle.

We’ve had a hot dry spell in Pennsylvania and since we put in hundreds of young flowers and other plants at White Horse Farm I was dragging hose from one spigot to the other to deliver life giving water and keep them alive. It is always a wonder of nature and the beauty of creation to see how a wilted, brown edged leaf lifts itself toward the sky after a good dousing.

But there is no amount of artificial watering with a hose over a large amount of lawn and landscaping that comes close to the benefit of a good rain shower. So, as I am dragging hose and hooking up sprinklers and spot watering with a nozzle, I’m hoping for rain.

The other day as I felt the life giving water pulse through the hose vein in my hand, I considered the weather forecast that predicted rain the next day. But it was hot and dry THIS day, and the plants were weaping, so I kept watering.

I hoped for rain. But there were no sign I could trust it would come. And I started thinking about the difference between hope and trust. Hope is a wish with no foundation of certainty. Trust is the strong handshake and steely eyed nod of a man you know is of impeccable reputation.

If hope is your team winning, trust is seeing the final score with them on top.

If hope is doing well on the final exam, trust is knowing you’ve put in the study time and have mastered the material.

If hope is that she’ll say “Yes,” trust is that look in her eye when you go down to one knee.

How often do you express the uncertainty of hope, rather than trust of achievement when questioned about something significant for your future?

“Are you going to Europe this summer?” Hope so.

“Are you going to get into Wake Forest University?” Hope so.

 “Are you saving enough for a down payment on your first house?” Hope so.

“Have the doctors identified the problem?” Hope so.

What is the difference between hope and trust, between hope and knowing? The Bible in Hebrews 11:1 equates faith with knowing: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

My distinction here, and maybe it’s minor, is that trust begets certainty because facts, history of reliability and science taught you to expect a result. Things will or will not line up. You do have enough gas or charge to get home. Your child is where she said she would be.

Hope focuses on positive anticipation for the future. I hoped for rain, but based on the vagaries of weather reporting, our recent history of drought, and a cloudless sky, I didn’t trust it would come,

Trust assumes a certainty. I trust your word. I trust the train will arrive on time. I trust your fidelity.

I had prayed for rain, but frankly, had no faith it would actually rain that day. I did not carry an umbrella when I went to check the mail.

On sports talk radio the other day the host said he hoped the Phillies would win. He prayed they would win. “But I don’t count on it,” he said.

As a castrate Congress continues to let a lying, bloviating, clueless, self- dealing fraud run roughshod over the Constitution and laws established to limit such behavior, I hope America can survive the current administration.

But I don’t trust that it will.

Don’t be like my dad

normanjameson 5 Comments
Dad and me around 1956.

Over a breakfast of toast, fruit and eggs plucked moments earlier from the coop next to the house, my wife said I’d given her too much food. She was stirring her eggs about like a kid wishing lima beans to disappear.

“Just eat what you want, dear,” I said. “Don’t be like my dad.”

My dad, Marvin. Gone now for seven years. A child of the Depression, frugal to a fault. As a young man, he worked two and three jobs to buy groceries for his wife and three children, ages four to infant, living in a 19-foot trailer. He loathed the idea of “wasting” a single morsel of food well into his prosperous 80s.

Dad cleared his plate, no matter how miserable those last forkfuls made him feel later, especially if it was a restaurant meal for which he paid. I never understood it.

“Dad,” I’d say. “Don’t let some anonymous cook in the kitchen determine how much you’re going to eat, and how you’re going to feel afterward.”

Dad and me in 2015. He died in 2017.

But the thought of sending food back to the kitchen or down the disposal was anathema to dad.

Immediately after I told Sue Ellen, “Don’t be like my dad,” regarding his relationship with food, Newton’s third law of motion kicked in and brought an “equal and opposite reaction.” I thought of so many ways I would want my wife, my children, myself and anyone else to “be just like my dad.”

Dad was devoted to his family, teaching us to work by example, never complaining about his long hours. He stretched his finances to buy “the old Peterson place on County B” with 80 acres of farmland and an acre of lawn and outbuildings. On and off he tried raising steers, pigs and chickens to supplement his income driving a fuel truck among farms in four counties.

We mowed the grass, tended the large garden, fed the animals and picked stones from the fields that the annual freeze and thaw pulled to the surface. A big bellied wood burning furnace in the basement heated the old farm house so each Fall we gathered fuel from the woods.

He loved my mother in obvious ways, not afraid to hug, kiss and be silly with her in front of his children. My most poignant memory is of dad kissing his hand and laying it against the cold glass window as the ambulance carried her body away from the house, when she succumbed to cancer. He never got over her.

Dad’s reputation as an honest man was unassailable. He gave up the gas truck to manage the local farmers’ cooperative store, while also being treasurer of the local credit union, before computers. He had an amazing mind for numbers, though he never graduated high school.

He left home at 14, riding his bike to a neighboring town to live with his teacher aunt and attend school. But the lure of earning money to drive a dump truck for the county proved more attractive than another day in the classroom.

Yet, when i showed academic promise, dad instilled in me an assumption that i would become the family’s first college graduate.

Dad held opinions about things, but he easily relinquished defense of those opinions rather than stress a relationship.

I never heard him or mom exchange a cross word.

I could go on. Every Christmas I remember how he accidentally shattered my myth holding about Santa Claus. That fall he’d given me a football, just out of the blue. Dad never played organized sports, but we tossed the ball around a time or two.

That Christmas when i opened up my gift of a basketball, he took it, rolled it about in his hands, and said, “Do you remember the football I gave you?”

I nodded of course.

“I got this basketball at the same time.”

Fantasy fractured. St. Nick deconstructed.

But from that seed of myth, cracked open with the hammer of reality, grew over decades a sapling of hope, that one day, i could be like dad.