When I was eight, my father brought home an orphaned, tailless calf for my brother Adam and me to bottle-feed. One of our older brothers named it “Hope” because “we hoped it would survive.” Farm humor can be a bit morbid. But since we pulled that tiny shivering calf out of the trailer and wrangled her into the barn, the word hope, to me, has always meant her.
Paul in Romans says we hope for the unseen, echoing the writer of Hebrews, who calls faith “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Hope invites us into the realm of the already-not-yet, into expectation. In hope, Abraham “believed against hope” in God’s promise to give him offspring (Romans 4:18). He expected in the face of natural contrary expectation.
As our little calf grew in wisdom and stature (okay, maybe just stature), my brother and I moved beyond the modern understanding of hope, “hoping” she would live, to expectation and story weaving. We crafted a tragic backstory for the doe-eyed calf who followed us around the pen like a puppy. We invented a league of bovine superheroes who fought crime, imagining capes and scientifically suspicious weaponry. No, we weren’t delusional. We had the child’s ability to say, “Why not?” Just because I’d never actually seen Hope destroy an underground crime ring didn’t mean it was impossible. The stories we told each other were absurd, but those stories were our expectation—our hope.
The poet T.S. Eliot says, “The faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting,” as in a theatre: “The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed / With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, / And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama / And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away.”[1]
When scenery is changed in a play, we wait with expectation for the story to continue. And unless we hear glass shattering or a string of profanities, we don’t worry that anything will be wrong.
When nurturing an orphaned calf, we mix powdered milk, shovel manure, and weave starry-eyed tales of how the tailless, gangly lump of fur hiding in the corner will definitely save the world someday.
And when God sends a baby to a manure-filled stable, he answers the expectation offered in the garden of Eden and offers a new one: the promise of the returning King. And we, his people, continue to mix powdered milk, to roll set pieces on and off stage, to shovel more and more manure out of our barns. The hope is in the waiting, and the work of our hands as we wait, and the stories we tell of expectation.
[1] T.S. Eliot, “East Coker” in Four Quartets (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1971) 26–27.
Callie Johnson works as Editorial Assistant at Kelli Sallman Writing and Editing with a bachelor’s degree in Theatre Arts and Creative Writing from Calvary University. She previously interned with Kelli for two years, working as proofreader and copyeditor on several manuscripts. Her strange obsessions include kerning, East Coker, and the sound of cows chewing.