To WAIT ON THE LORD is not like waiting for the tide (it just basically has to come to you, doesn't it?), and to WAIT ON THE LORD is not like waiting for your ride to show up (they may never come at all).

To WAIT ON THE LORD is like waiting for a person --- a wise and loving person who never forgets --- is like waiting on a promise that is not obligated out of gravity but out of everlasting kindness --- is like waiting on a kindness that cannot lie.

So we will never be put to shame.

No one whose hope is in you
will ever be put to shame.

psalm 25:3

And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. Romans 5:2b-5

When put into a narrow place, a strait and still straiter space,
the impulse of the breath is up up up and in
to rearrange the organs and turn sideways the gait
to make the self disappear and the breath turn thin.

The mountain range is an insistent endless danger.
The hope to see the summit has gone dry.
---Hope now to shrink our bodies, and hurry in anger
at ourselves for childish feelings and long lives.

Whatever pocket once held the mustard seeds
had some hole, eaten through maybe in our sleep?
We ask nothing of these cliffs, this sea,
but to spare us. They have no promises to keep.

So we force ourselves thin to fit, to slide
unsuccessfully past the crush of narrow paths
---or, fat, we succumb and try to hide
beneath falling rocks, to feel their fatal wrath.

No one is casting any mountains in the sea or begging
for the crooked ways to go straight.
The problem is not with the landscape, we reckon,
but with our bodies. So we lose weight.

waiting on the Lord

thin faith

moves and removes