The Job Of Patience

No one could argue that having patience requires a great deal of work. That is as it should be. We should not feel ourselves in any way lacking or faulty if certain opportunities to exercise patience require a good deal more effort than we would like to expend. The effort must be made. Sure, we could collapse to the floor and beat our fists and our heels and scream until we are blue in the face, but once we have worn ourselves out, we will find that we will still have to wait with patience all the same. Acquiring and keeping a hold of and practicing patience can sometimes feel like a job - it can be boring, unpleasant, and sometimes it is all we can do to merely run out the clock. But just as many of us are obliged to go to work at our jobs even when we find them boring and unpleasant, so are we obliged to work at grabbing and maintaining a hold of patience, even when we must do so with turbulence and anxiety roiling away in our hearts. We will not always succeed at the job of patience, but the more often and the more sincerely that we make the effort, the more accustomed to the strain and rigors of reigning in our impatience and our stress and our worries and our fears so that we may instead try to give room in our souls for the patience and the peace and the understanding that is the just recompense for all of our efforts. The Lord’s timing is His own, and it proceeds according to His perfect knowledge of exactly what we need and when we need it and in accordance with His perfect love for us and His unyielding desire for our every happiness and opportunity for improvement and success. If some desired blessing has not been delivered to us in the time we would like or beg for, then we must work a little harder on our job of patience and reconcile ourselves to wait and wrestle and struggle for that peace of mind and stillness of soul to continue on with hope undimmed for that day to come when our righteous desires will be fulfilled. God would not allow us to have a righteous desire unless He did not plan for us to eventually receive it in its fullness. I know that all of our efforts to work out our patience will be rewarded in the end.