Patience

Ah, patience. “Lord, please give me patience, as fast as you can.” Many of us find it difficult to wait, but simply waiting is not the full measure of patience. Patience is one of the foundations of creation; it is the relentless pull upon all created things to have them conform to the pattern of perfection in which they were formed. Patience is God’s embrace. This understanding should help us to form a new, more wholesome understanding of patience.

The universe does not wait for us, it simply possesses us. Our Lord does not wait upon us; He simply embraces us, not because He is ours but because we are His. We often presume we must choose Him but this is a myopic view of reality. He has chosen us and that is who we are, that is all there is. Like our Lord, perfection does not wait upon us, it posses us. Why? Our destiny does not wait upon us because there is nowhere else for us to go, nowhere else for us to be. However, we can resist the pull of perfection as long as we wish, and the simple fact that the universe does not abandon us we attribute to waiting. However, perfection knows that our conformity is inevitable, so it simply enfolds us and holds us close. When we stop resisting its pull, we can feel the tender loving kindness that envelopes us, and know we live in the embrace called patience.

We choose constantly. Each choice is a fresh new opportunity to surrender to the pull of patience. We may choose perfection or we may choose otherwise. The fact that we have not always chosen perfection does not matter. The Lord does not love us any less; the universe is not impatient with us, for impatience has never been a part of perfection. We are never without choices. We may from time to time have limited the variety of the choices before us, but they are still there in sufficient quantity for us to conform to the pull of perfection. Only by choosing do we grow; do we move toward our destiny. It may seem that the choices before us are too small to be so meaningful. This is the grand illusion that our opportunities are too mundane to be stepping stones to perfection. In fact, if our path godward were not paved with the seemingly unimportant opportunities that face us each day, they would not challenge us the way they do.

Let us not become impatient, with ourselves, with others or with our Lord. In reality, impatience is simply our resisting the embrace of perfection. We are where we should be, we are who we should be, and never has there been a moment filled with promise like there is right now. Perfection has never given up on us nor relaxed its embrace. We find ourselves enfolded in the arms of God this day, and in our next choice, this is all that really matters.