In Your Patience Possess Ye Your Souls

“In your patience possess ye your souls.” (Luke 21:19). God gave us time to practice on so that we can prepare for eternity. Time is not natural to our immortal souls, just as eternity is not natural to our mortal minds. The struggle that we so often feel is between these two contradictory parts of our selves. The fact that we are all going to die is constantly pulling us out of the present moment. We pour ourselves into fantasies of what our life could have been like if we had made different choices, or lose ourselves in nightmares of what our life will become if certain things don’t go our way. As beings that are partly eternal, we feel an inexorable need to last, and as beings that are partly mortal, we feel an urgent haste to ensure our longevity before our chance disappears. Impatience is the product of our mortal half trying to strip away the eternal aspects of our soul. But as Jesus says, in patience, we may possess our souls. When we can truly exercise patience, we can hold onto the eternal nature of our souls. We can remember that we existed long before the heavens and the earth were created, and we will exist long after our bones are laid in the ground. When we have patience, we get to keep our souls in the eternal now, and not surrender them to ruminations about the past or anxieties about the future. I know that we are eternal beings and that we can hold onto eternity when we practice true patience.