It is one of the most difficult choices I face in daily life. It is a choice that each one of you undoubtedly has also faced this week. You, of course, know what I am talking about:
The decision about which checkout line will be fastest.
In these days of gargantuan grocery stores, building supply and warehouse stores, we constantly have to choose among checkout lines. And picking the fastest one is not easy. Even when I do my best assessment, by counting the number of people in line, scanning the number of items in each chart, assessing how fast the shopper might be able to move through the self-serve kiosk or how fast the cashier might be able to check the shoppers out, I never seem to pick the fastest one. There is the shopper who can’t figure out how to do the self-checkout, the cashier who likes to chat, or the dreaded “price check.”
I don’t want this to sound like an old Seinfeld episode, but you have to admit that life is full of obstacles and irritations: from the dump truck that pulls out in front of you just as the 2-lane stretch begins on route 100, to the phone call that comes in just as you are ready to head home from the office, to the adult daughter who for some reason repeatedly failed to heed my infinitely wise advice. Well, now that I have gotten that off my chest, are you ready for me to preach on patience?
Patience is a fruit of the Spirit, and to be honest, there probably is no fruit that I find more difficult to grow in my spirit. Judging by conversations I have had recently with other people, I do not think I am alone. And perhaps, there is no quality more at odds with our “fast food, quick fix, instant replay culture,”[1] where a letter which takes just two days to cross 3000 miles is derisively called “snail mail.” So perhaps of all of the fruits of the Spirit, this is one where you – and I – need to pay particular attention.
How can we be more patient? As I studied these scriptural passages, I was struck by three things we can say about patience.
First, patience is a matter of recognizing priorities and limits.
When I fume about slow check-out lines, or that dump truck in front of me on route 100, and when I stop and think about it, I suddenly realize: how much time am I really losing anyway? Am I really going to let this two-minute delay, or even longer delay, ruin my day? When I am frustrated with how long something is taking – whether at work, or home, or in the world, I have to be reminded: “Look, Carter, people and the world are not here to follow your timetable.” Some things take time – and our impatience will not make them occur any faster – or better.
In his book, Thank You For Being Late, Thomas Friedman writes, “technologists want us to think that patience became a virtue only because in the past ‘we had no choice,’ we had to wait longer for things because our modems were too slow our broadband hadn’t been installed, or because we hadn’t upgraded our phone.” Some people think that new technology has made waiting obsolete. But there is wisdom in patience and that wisdom comes from patience. “Patience wasn’t just the absence of speed. It was space for reflection and thought.” We are generating more knowledge, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.”[2]
Some things take time – like building relationships and trust. As Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership has written, “Our ability to forge deep relationships – to love, to care, to hope, to trust…is one of the most uniquely human capacities we have. [And that takes time.] “Not everything is better faster or meant to go faster. I am built to think about [the next generations]. I am not a cheetah.”[3]
Maybe that book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten was right. What did we learn in kindergarten about crossing the street? To stop, look, and listen. Maybe we need to do more of that. Maybe we need to grow in our capacity to be patient. Patience is a matter of recognizing priorities and limits.
Second, patience is a matter of love. “Love is patient,” Paul says in his great hymn of love in 1 Corinthians. Patience lies at the heart of our love for others just as it lies at the heart of God’s love for us. “Who is a God like you,” Micah writes, “pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression…He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency…cast[ing] our sins int the depths of the sea.”
God’s love for us is a patient, forbearing love. If we were to get our just desserts, then there would be no human left alive, because we all fall short of God’s requirements. The story of God’s people is a seemingly never-ending story of God’s patient love in the face of our rebellions and rejections. As revealed in Jesus Christ, God is “the [Parent] who waits and prays and prays and waits with outstretched hands and heart to receive the prodigal son back home.”[4]
As God is so patient with us, are we not meant to be patient with those whom we claim to love? Since God puts up with our frailties and flaws, is it not right to put up with others’ frailties and flaws? Patient love recognizes that none of us is perfect, so we will not demand perfection of others, any more than God demands perfection in us before God will start loving us.
Patient love recognizes that mistakes and failures are inevitable when we are learning and growing. Our children, our parents, our friends, our co-workers, and we ourselves will not always “get it” the first time. But love is patient with others, just as God is patient with us, when we do not “get it” the first time – or the second time – or the tenth time.
As one of the staff members observed when we reflected on patience at staff meeting this past week, listening and empathy helps us be more patient with other people. To some extent all other people are a mystery. We do not know precisely what they are facing in their life, what they are feeling, how their past has shaped them. Love seeks to listen and understand because love is patient.
Finally, patience is a matter of faith.
Sometimes our impatience is silly, because we are impatient over silly and trivial things. But sometimes our impatience is anything but silly, because we are impatient for good reasons. We long for good and important things, such as healing or peace or justice or good leaders, and we grow discouraged when our longings are not met. We pray unceasingly for some good and important thing, such as true love, or friendship, or a better job – and we grow impatient when God does not seem to answer our prayers.
Luke’s gospel is written for people dealing with such an impasse. When the gospel was first read, years had come and gone since Jesus taught the disciples. As the Biblical scholar Fred Craddock notes, the early church had been praying, “Thy kingdom come” for years, but they were experiencing persecution and hardship instead, with no end in sight. As a result, they were losing heart.[5] Luke uses Jesus’ parable about the mistreated widow and the unjust judge to offer a word of assurance to the early church – and to us. If an unjust judge will grant the widow’s request just to get rid of her, how much more can we count on God to grant our requests and give us what we need?!
Patience is a matter of faith, grounded in the memory of how God has been faithful in the past and resting on the hope that our faithful and loving God will come through in the end. We can be patient because we can trust that God knows us and hears us, that God loves us and answers our prayers, and that God will keep the promises that God has made to us.
As we struggle with God’s timetable and our impatience, it may help us to realize that sometimes the problem is us. Too often we are blind to what God is up to, unaware of how we are contributing to the problem rather than the solution, or we are failing to listen to what God is saying. We are not always the fastest learners so we need more time. We are waiting because God is waiting on us.
Sometimes we wait because God is shaping us through our long days and nights into a vessel that will be able to hold the answer when it comes.[6] Sometimes we wait because there are some things that God can only teach us by waiting – such as patience. Waiting can make us develop deeper spiritual roots that will help us in the long run. Sometimes we wait, because what we want is not what we need – and God knows that.
And sometimes we wait because a loving God will not force people to change any more than God will force us to change. I recall a young woman sharing that her alcoholic father had stopped drinking, had become a Christian, and was turning his life around. With tears she shared that she had been praying this for her father for fifteen years. For 15 years, she was waiting for God – who was waiting for her father to want to change.
Do you know that the words “wait” or “waiting” on the Lord occur 116 times in the Bible? Waiting comes with the territory of being human, of living by faith and not by sight. But when the people are called to “wait on the Lord,” it is never a passive thing, never just a case of marking the time until something better comes along, never a matter of wasting time. No, like the widow in Luke, we are called to persist, to keep on knocking, to keep on praying. Without losing heart.
In my lifetime, there have been three developments on the world stage that I prayed for but was not sure that I would ever see take place in my lifetime: the ending of the sectarian fighting in Northern Ireland; the end of apartheid in South Africa; and the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the files that Kerry and I have accumulated through the years on “patience,” I found again this story of a pastor’s visit to Hungary shortly after the Wall fell in 1989 and Eastern Europe opened up again to democracy and Christianity.
The pastor was Dale Cooper, a Reformed Church pastor. In 1990, a year after the fall of the wall, he visited a small town in Hungary, Sarospatak. In that town he visited two places. The first one was a five-hundred year-old cellar where Tokay wine was being made, much as it had been for centuries. Bringing those wines to maturity takes years.
The other place Cooper visited was the Sarospatak Academy. The occasion was the return of the Academy to the Hungarian Reformed Church by the communists. The Academy was founded in 1531 and is the second oldest Protestant Christian school in the entire world. In 1951, the Hungarian Communists had taken away the school and made it into a place where for the first time in more than four centuries “neither the name nor the claims of Jesus were ever to be mentioned.”
At the official reopening ceremony in 1990, there was a 88-year-old man, Dr. Kalman Ujszasazy, who had been the principal of the school when the communists took over in 1951. Cooper writes, “this old man, crippled by a broken hip, “wept unashamedly with joy. ‘To God be the Glory,’ he said with measured dignity as he lifted a glass of that Tokay wine to his lips. ‘Now I can die in peace.’” He then told Cooper, “We must again introduce the students to God. The Lord will provide, but it will take time.”
Cooper reflected on that day, the school, and that wine cellar. He writes, those words were spoken by a man whose life had been lived under a regime that had prevented him for [40 years] from doing what he had most longed to do – to teach young people in the name of God. Somehow, by divine grace, these long years had not turned him bitter; in fact, he had become more saintly.”
“The Lord will provide – but it will take time.” “How much time?” Cooper wondered. “Longer perhaps than I, an impatient American am used to having things take.” But in that wine cellar I had been “in the presence of grapes that had begun fermenting long before communism came to Hungary – and would continue in the slow process long after that ideology had vanished.”
“God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform,” Cooper concluded. “But sometimes his purposes [are] like a fine wine;” they take time.[7]
In the words of the prophet, you, who “wait upon the Lord shall renew [your] strength; [you] shall mount up with wings as eagles; [you] shall run, and not be weary; and [you] shall walk, and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31)
[1] Maxie Dunnam and Kimberly Dunnam Reisman, The Workbook on Virtues and the Fruit of the Spirit (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1998), 151.
[2] Thomas Friedman, Thank You for Being Late (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 6. Quoting in part Leon Wieseltier.
[3] Quoted by Friedman, 6.
[4] Dunham and Reisman, 147.
[5] Fred B. Craddock, Luke (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990), 209.
[6] Craddock, 209-10.
[7] The Reformed Journal, October 1990, p. 8.