Patient Endurance

“Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength” (Isaiah 40:31).

The New Testament tells us that the three great Christian virtues are faith, hope, and love.  But along with other virtues such as joy, gentleness, and humility, we are urged to pursue patience.  And patience is increasingly difficult for us to find.  When we want something, we want it right away.  Any delay in attaining our desires seems to be more than we can bear.

Patience is a critical part of the Christian way of life.  When we seek God’s answer for our prayers, do we ever get bent out of shape because he answers them too quickly?  Not that I’ve ever seen!  We struggle with how long it takes for God to do what we want him to, or what we expect him to.

This is not something unique to our microwave, instant oatmeal era.  For thousands of years, God’s people wrestled with how long it seems for him to get around to doing what we hope for.  I suspect that as the ancient Israelites suffered as slaves for four centuries in Egypt, more than a few of them wondered why God was taking so long to deliver them.  I count at least ten times that the psalmists ask the Lord, “How long?”  How long will you allow the wicked to prosper?  How long will you hide your face from me?  How long must I struggle?  One of the greatest crises in the early church was what scholars call “the delay of the parousia:” a fancy way to say that they thought Jesus would return very soon.  He didn’t, and he still hasn’t.  Nearly every generation of Christians since the resurrection has hoped that Christ would come in their time.  And so far, he hasn’t.

I suspect you’ve experienced the same thing in your life that I have: that which you’ve been hoping and praying for just never seems to happen.  It takes forever, and you don’t know how much longer you can last.  You simply can’t understand why God is taking so long.  Perhaps it even makes you wonder if he cares, or will ever take care of you.  “Waiting on the Lord” sounds inspirational when you read it in the Bible or hear about it in church, but living it can really drain you.

In the leadership program that I’m going through this year, we’ve talked about the need for changes to happen slowly.  When we see something as a church that “needs to be fixed,” we often jump in with a quick fix, without considering what’s really going on.  And we’re likely to latch onto one Big Idea that we think will take care of things, when in reality the process includes many different small steps, some of which will work and some of which won’t.

The Greek word (úπομονη) that we typically translate as “patience” doesn’t simply mean sitting around on the bench the hallway, waiting for something to happen.  It can also be translated into words like “endurance” and “perseverance.”  Waiting on the Lord takes effort, and it means we’re at work while we watch for what he will do.

Beyond Science

God created us to be a unity of body, mind, and spirit.  But that’s not how many of us view ourselves.  It’s an unfortunate side effect of the Scientific Revolution.  The scientific process, which began to take off in the 1600’s and 1700’s, is a remarkable way to understand and study the physical world.  None of the medical and technological advances that we enjoy today would be possible without it.

The downside, however, is that because science is so good at helping us learn about the physical aspect of reality, we’ve come to believe that everything worth knowing can be known through science.  In fact, it’s commonly assumed that if science can’t study it, then it doesn’t exist.  But there are aspects of reality that have nothing to do with what science can study.  There is more to what makes us human that what experiments and fancy equipment can measure.  We call it the spiritual part of who we are.

But because we’ve come to overlook, ignore, and even deny the fact that we are spiritual as well as physical beings, some interesting things have begun to happen.  While organized religion like churches are only one way to explore our spiritual nature, but the gradual decline that our nation is seeing across the board in church participation is one aspect of our lack of spiritual awareness.  Going to church for your spiritual development makes no sense for people who don’t know or care that they have a spirit that needs developing.

But there’s no denying the spiritual part of our humanity.  Our natural desires to connect with the spiritual part of life comes out in all sorts of odd ways, even while many people in our society refuse to accept any sort of formal spirituality.  Consider, for example, our society’s fascination with the “paranormal:” things that can’t be explained by science, things that fly in the face of what regular life is all about.  What else can explain the popularity of vampires, werewolves, zombies, and alien invasions?  It’s simply our instinctual urge to connect on the spiritual level, coming out in odd ways because we’ve forgotten that we are spiritual beings.

On the other hand, people have explored and developed their awareness of the spiritual part of existence for thousands of years.  We’ve learned a lot, and as Christians we recognize that God has shown us a lot, most importantly through Jesus Christ.  We don’t have all the answers, but at least we’re asking the questions that others don’t even know are out there.

That’s what church is all about: the opportunity to explore and understand the fullness of what it means to be a person.  It’s a place to develop your own spirit, and to understand the world in ways that science never can.