I can remember very vividly a time in my life when I was angry that God had not answered my cries for help. I had been looking for a career for some time, trying to find some direction in my life, and felt that every door I approached was abruptly closed.

For a while, I believed that this was part of God's plan to lead me to some more rewarding path. But after about a year or so of what felt like constant rejection, I simply felt abandoned.

We're told in today's second reading that Abraham never doubted God's promise that he would become "the father of many nations, so great will your descendants be" - even when he and his wife were childless for nearly 100 years! "He did not doubt God's promise in unbelief," Paul writes to the Romans. "Rather, he was strengthened by faith and gave glory to God and was fully convinced that what he had promised he was also able to do." No doubt Abraham and Sarah were surprised to conceive a child in their nineties!

In today's first reading, the prophet Hosea chastises the people of Israel for their feeble faith: "Your piety is like a morning cloud," he says, "like the dew that early passes away."

The contrast we're given today is between someone who believes in God's promise through decades of disappointment, and a people whose faith vanishes the minute they don't receive the outcome they expect. Abraham believed he would be made a great patriarch, even as the likelihood of this happening seemed to grow more and more remote. How are we to keep believing in God's promises when they simply don't materialize?

One answer may be to explore just whose promise we are relying on. In Abraham's case, perhaps he was able to remain confident because he knew that it was God's promise, not his own demands, that he was waiting for. I mean, if you know that God has promised you something in your life, it isn't your responsibility to make it happen. For lack of a better expression, it is God's problem to keep God's promises.

As I look back on my own experience of doubt and anger, I have to ask whether I was waiting for the fulfillment of a promise from God or simply for my own expectations for my life to come to pass. Did God promise me a rewarding career? Or is that something I simply expected as some kind of quasi-spiritual entitlement?

In today's Gospel reading, Jesus is surrounded by "tax collectors and sinners," and gladly welcomes them into his company. The religious leaders are incensed that anyone would accept these "undesirable" characters in God's name. They seem to feel that a holy man would spend his time with the outwardly holy, and they reject Christ and his message because it does not comply with or reinforce their expectations for how God works in the world.

Perhaps they, like me, need to revisit the source of these expectations. Are our expectations based on the promise of God or on our own assumptions about how God works in the world?

It would serve us all well to hinge our expectations on promises that God has made. Then, we wouldn't need to force solutions or demand actions. Only God is responsible for making good. We can await the results, and be pleasantly surprised when they come.

Bill Peatman writes from Napa. He may be reached at bptidings@yahoo.com.