If You Truly Want to Follow Christ Learn Patience

I once read that the average person looks at his or her phone roughly 100 times a day.  This would be an average between an extremely high teen rate, which might be twice that, to a very low elderly rate, which might be just a few times or not even once.

In the old days, meaning a few decades back, people may have checked their watches that often, but thanks to modern technology, we can now check the time, our messages, and the news, all at once, 100 times a day.  Why do people feel the need to check a device roughly five times an hour?   I suggest this is because we have become the most impatient society of all time.

Delay and Waiting Have Become Four Letter Words

Technology has induced, and subsequently fed, our obsession with knowing NOW!  Waiting has become the game of fools.  Why wait in line when you can click online?  We are offered such convenience that we have become spoiled into a near total intolerance of delay and waiting.  We now want information, entertainment, and responses yesterday!

Waiting and delays are increasingly associated with dysfunctional and incompetent, if not archaic methods.  I do not like waiting in lines at the bank or supermarket either.  Sure, I hate being put on hold when I call an office.  I am as impatient as anyone with waiting and delays.  However, our tolerance for delay has often been reduced to nil.  We have come to associate waiting with ineptitude and misuse.

While this is sometimes true, there are two points to make in this regard.  First, it is not always true.  Sometimes, there are valid reasons for delay that are beyond our control or even the control of others.  Second, regardless of the reason for delay, griping about it gets us nowhere.  There is a way to approach and deal with delay and waiting which can bring us closer to Christ.

Consider the Sage Advice of St. Alphonsus

St. Alphonsus is one of my favorite saints. One of his big topics is Divine Providence and God’s Will.  Alphonsus suggests that if we truly love God, we will increasingly accept everything, including delays, as His Will.  This is because love means trust and trust means believing that  since God is all good, anything that He allows to happen to us is, ultimately, for our good.  Our ultimate good, by the way, is gaining our and others’ eternal salvation by loving, serving, and obeying God and loving and serving others.

We have to believe that God uses delays for our edification and growth toward Him.  It is easy to find good in good things that happen to us. Alphonsus challenges us to find good things in unfortunate or undesirable things that happen to us, and delays fall neatly in that category.

Delays can Provide a Needed Makeover

Our Lord often delays in answering our prayers and desires precisely because He wants our earthly expectations to fall into their rightful place in the service of God.  Perhaps he wants to instill more humility in us.  Or maybe He wants to ground us more in what truly matters. Perhaps He wants to teach to overcome some barrier, take better risks,  or learn from some mistake.   Maybe He just want us to refocus on Him and learn patience, or reach out to others rather than obsess over ourselves.

Jairus unsuccessfully sought out Christ to save his dying daughter before she died (Mark 5:21-43). Martha and Mary likewise anguished that Christ would be too late to save their dying brother Lazarus (John 11:21-22).  But, in both cases, Christ was not “too late.” Rather, he was late enough to test their faith, to allow falls in expectations as a reminder that being on the ground, both in life and in death, is never the end if we believe that God is there for us.

God uses our earthly falls as opportunities to instill patience, faith, and devotion.  We often read of the need to “stop and smell the roses” but, increasingly, this society has no patience for stopping or roses.

Good Things Come to Those who Wait

At the end of the day, what is impatience but selfish mistrust.  We are not willing to wait because we associate waiting with lost time and opportunity.  Delay is viewed as an infringement upon our plans, desires, and agenda.  We resent delays because it is all about us, and delays do not seem to care what we want.  Is this not what selfishness smells like?  Does not selfishness focus on what we want exclusive of anything else?   Likewise, we mistrust delays as an inconvenient waste of our valuable time.  We fail to see any possible value in waiting – in patience – and gripe that lost time can only hurt us.

Maybe we should consider the possibility that God can use delays for our growth and benefit.  Waiting can provide us with time to consider what we are doing.  It can give us the chance to evaluate options better.  It can even offer us the chance to plan our next steps.

Consider the possibility that God makes us wait to test our faith, our resolve, and our planning.  Ponder the possibility that The Almighty uses delay as a tool for His divine work.  Remember that God is what matters and God is worth all the delays we face combined and more.

Rumor has it that God tests people.  Just ask Abraham how God tested his faith.  If we trust God completely, then waiting will slide off our backs in the face of serving God.

Patience is Still a Virtue

Our use of modern technology has made us grow increasingly impatient with delay and waiting.  It paints these things as at least a waste of time and at worst a disaster.  Waiting is depicted as a game for foolish, incompetent victims of misfortune.

While many still vaguely recall patience as being called a virtue, it seems that avoiding the need to be patient is increasingly viewed as even greater virtue.

Throughout his ministry, Christ demonstrated that finding and living the serenity and peace of God is only possible where faith, trust, and total abandonment to God’s providence prevails.  Moving forward, trust that God will provide you with the tools to etch the purpose He has for your life.

We all have a mission to fulfill for His Greater Glory, and that mission has a timetable.  Focus on offering your life to God’s plan, and let the delays in your life merely be pauses on the path to fulfilling that plan.