Why We Need: Patience
“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.” Jean Chardin
I was reflecting recently on my first truly rural experience.
About twenty years ago, my wife and I spent a couple of weeks on a small coffee finca in Guatemala. It was very rural—as in, very little electricity, very little plumbing, and very many critters.
Each night, after checking that no rats made it into the room and crushing the spiders and scorpions that inevitably did, I would take a few moments to observe with awe the depth of the darkness and the sound of serene silence.
That sensory-scape was layered over the lifestyle of our hosts, which was also utterly foreign—even vis-à-vis the cacophonous culture of the capital city a few hours away. Our guide through the stay was a guy about my age who I came to refer to as “the Guatemalan Huck Finn”—what with his straw hat, hammock, and propensity to pepper his conversations with a drawn-out “síííííí hombre” (“yeeaahh man”). He would tell me that the country life was the life for him; the Central American city slickers could have all the noise and anxiety to themselves.
What was so striking about being grafted into these new rhythms of existing was the seasonality: as a small, multi-family coffee farm, our friends had no shortage of chores and labors every day. But the essence of their endeavor was planting and harvesting, with much time between the two. Time spent hoping for rain…and waiting for growth.
I realized in that place that patience previously had been a hazy concept to me, almost an abstraction—a noble state of being that seemed always just out of reach. There, in that community, so tied to the seasons of the sky and energy of the earth, patience was palpable. Daily life conformed to it, naturally and by necessity.
Because growth requires it.
In our screen-mediated strivings we can scale; with our rechargeable tools we can reap rapid returns. But with all living things—with everything organic that relates to and reflects a divine origin—growth requires patience.
Whether plant, or pet, or person, its frame and fruit will flower only with patient participation. Rhythms, relationships, reconciliation, redemption…all require patience. Regularly.
But what constitutes patience? Indeed, what is the nature of this condition, this attribute, that we’ve been told is a virtue but so often feels like a vice? Let’s examine the word itself.
The English term patience comes to us from the Latin patientia, meaning “the quality of suffering”. Immediately, we see a truth: whatever “being patient” looks like in a given scenario, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It involves some form of suffering; not surprisingly, many English translations of the Bible have long-suffering where another version might read patience.
The ramifications of a misunderstanding here—of viewing patience as something that must be pleasant and impatience something rather less so—can be significant.
To wit, a leader I was walking with through Canyon Pathways’ spiritual direction said often during our time together “I know I’m impatient”, or “I know I need more patience”. We discovered that, while those statements might have been true, the fact that “the waiting” was hard and a bit disagreeable (instead of wonderfully delightful) did not mean that he lacked patience.
Indeed, in that particular case, the individual’s aptitudes and attributes (for example, his activator strength) meant that he, more than others, lives continually with an internal disposition of being “ready for action”, like a coiled spring—with all of its innate tension.
That understanding—that being patient involves some level of suffering or tension—begins to free us from a needless guilt and focuses us on the more foundational truth: patience is more about presence than it is about pleasantness. Being patient means being present, being here even though it is hard, being available even when it’s aggravating. Not absent, not checked out, not hiding hacks or sheltering secrets to myopically make long suffering short.
When we embrace this, when we accept that this spiritual product called patience means simply waiting when we don’t want to and continuing when we’d rather quit, we can understand the attendant crankiness—but let contentment start to seep in. We can view rightly the excruciating tension—and begin to slowly enjoy an exhilarating tenacity instead.
We can, in short, begin to manifest the endurance of the Creator and Redeemer, who is patient toward us, and in so doing experience both the freedom and faithful abiding inherent to sonship.
That’s something worth waiting for.
“…regard the patience of our Lord as salvation…” 2 Peter 3:15