TRUST AND HOPE
Blessed is the [person] who trusts in the Lord, whose hope is the Lord. - Jeremiah 17:5-10
What is trust and hope in the Lord? First of all, trust and hope are not something that you or I can see. Sometimes people confuse hope for optimism. In the simplest of definitions, trust means reliability and stability, while hope means to wait. Waiting for God’s timing and God’s grace is stable and reliable. Not our timing, nor our own will. So, what is trust and hope?
An audience asked Richard Rohr, OFM, during an interview on National Catholic Reporter, “Is suffering our way through to knowability and higher consciousness?” Rohr’s response, “Well, really love is. But when you love anything completely, you will suffer. Suffering is the only thing that humbles our control needs.” For Rohr, “Whenever you are not in control, you are suffering. Therefore, we must take advantage when we are not in control to little by little, hand over control to someone else aka God”. Trust in the Lord means to hand over control, little by little, because God is stable and reliable.
In today’s first reading, Jeremiah tells us how “cursed is the man who trusts in human beings”. For most of my life, I depended on people for help, relied on people, and assumed that people would eventually come to rescue me from my life. At the beginning of 2019, God used everything in my life to transform me and invited me into deeper trust relationship through surgery for cancer.
This was the scar that maimed me, where I learned physically and mentally how to let go. I let go of who I used to know myself to be and allowed the Lord to take the lead. Why? Because, I was physically and mentally in the space and time of the unknown. This was the time I talked with our Lord, hoped in our Lord, and kept asking our Lord what I could do in the moment. My surgery was a BIG restart button where I started again with the basics like learning to walk again, laugh again, and eat again. In the summer of 2019, this was the scar where God whispered, “See my child, how I continue to give you life? So live.”
Are there areas in my life where I rely on control rather than trust in our Lord? Am I hopeful or optimistic?
Tram Nguyen