When you find yourself waiting for satisfaction

We tend to go looking for satisfaction in the stuff of our lives.

We wait for the vacation or the next season or the promotion or the completion. We wait for the kids to grow up or the schedule to ease. We wait for the bonus to land, the situation to improve, or the deal to close. We treat satisfaction like something that arrives once life makes room for it. Satisfaction will come, we tell ourselves, when the morning is over and the slow afternoon begins.

Moses asks for it in the morning.

Notice when Moses asks for it: "Satisfy us in the morning."

At the front of the day, before it has produced anything worth being satisfied about. Before the meeting or the activity or the results are in.

The prayer puts satisfaction at the front of the day.

Notice what Moses asks God to satisfy us with: "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love."

The fullness is connected to a specific source. It comes from God's steadfast love, regardless of what the day produces. The same love shows up on the day everything works, the day nothing works, and everything in-between.

The satisfaction Moses prays for has a source outside the day.

But the verse keeps going: "Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days."

Moses asks for satisfaction in one morning, with the joy expected to last all our days. That could mean all day long. It could mean all the days. Perhaps both. The small request produces a large effect. A morning of input, a whole life of output. Most things that fill us up run out by evening; this one isn't supposed to.

A morning's satisfaction sustains a brief life.

The day's work doesn't have to produce the satisfaction.

It can flow from satisfaction that was given before the work began. Moses prays for the supply at the beginning. The work that follows expresses what's already there.

The morning is where the gladness for all our days gets handed over.

How would your day go if you started satisfied?