Daily Manna · Day 171 · June 20
Wait on the Lord
“Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.”
Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.
Meet the man saying it, because the psalm gives you a great deal of him. He has armies in his imagination and possibly at his door: though an host should encamp against me. He has people lying about him in public: false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as breathe out cruelty. He has been left by the two people least likely to leave, since he counts his father and his mother among those who have forsaken him. And the one thing he says he actually wants is not rescue. It is to dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, which is the request of a man who has stopped negotiating for outcomes.
He is not calm. Halfway through the psalm his voice changes and he is pleading, hide not thy face far from me. So the command to wait is not issued from a quiet study by somebody with nothing at stake. It is a man talking himself out of doing something rash, which is why he says it twice with a promise wedged between, and why the strengthening is placed inside the wait rather than after it. The delay is where the heart gets built.
The warning is in what waiting is not. It is not passivity; this man is still praying, still going to the house of God, still keeping his hands clean while the lies circulate. But impatience is not a small thing either. This man has been lied about in public for long enough to want it settled, and he asks for one thing instead, which is to dwell in the house of the LORD. The deadline pressing on you was almost certainly set by you. Be careful what you are willing to spend to meet it.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 171 is When I Fall (Micah 7:8).