New Every Morning

"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. I say to myself, "The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait on Him." The Lord is good to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord." Lamentations 3:22-26

So much promise in that verse.
"For His compassions never fail, they are new every morning!"
I can't even fathom that kind of love. One of my favorite parts about this verse is that after the writer is reminded of the Lord's great love, they proceed to say "the Lord is my portion; I will wait on Him." At the end the author again says "it is GOOD to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord."
I absolutely hate waiting. I'm one of the most impatient people in the world, I hate anything that slows me down, gets in my way, or takes too long. Our world is extremely uncomfortable with delayed satisfaction, and we make every effort to achieve and obtain quick, but often fleeting, ways of gratifying our lives. We realize we hunger, but we fail to realize that our deepest hunger cannot be satisfied by those momentary pleasures.
My mom brought this up during Thanksgiving a couple days ago and its really been something I've thought about a lot during the past few days. God's word calls me to wait. Say what? Yep, its true. The bible is full of people who have to wait. Our deepest longings will only be satisfied by the renewal of God, who is continually making things new, but perhaps not at the speed we desire. Therefore we must wait.
I've been learning recently that waiting on the Lord is not like waiting in line at a store, but more like waiting when I was a child on my birthday when I finally got to rip open my birthday presents. There is hope and expectation, along with the assurance that I do not know what is wrapped under the bows and wrapping paper, but I do know the one who gives the gift and I know that the gift is an expression of the giver's love for me. While we wait on the Lord, we do not wait in fear and anxiety of what might come in the future, we wait with faith and hope in the God who holds the future.

To wait is to learn the spiritual grace of detachment (letting go) the freedom of desire. Not the absence of desire, but desire at rest.
Psalm 131:2 says "But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is with my soul within me."
What a beautiful picture David paints. A young child resting contently against her mother's chest. The child David is describing isn't demanding, isn't frustrated, isn't complaining. There are no insistent tears- the child has learned to wait.
"Detachment (the word) might evoke wrong impressions. It is not a cold, indifferent attitude; not at all. An authentic spiritual understanding of detachment devalues neither desire nor the objects of desire. Instead it aims at correcting one's own anxious grasping in order to free oneself to a committed relationship with God." John Elredge