Patience

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always placed patience in a category with waiting and time, which I wish I had more of. But once I really began contemplating patience, I realized that patience has much more gravity than that.

The definition of patience is this: “The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.”

After reading that definition, I recognized that with patience comes perseverance. Therefore, patience is not only our ability to endure, but it is also our willingness to endure.

To be able to start to see what patience looks like, we must direct ourselves to God, who will not only wait for us forever, but He will also love us while He waits.

Isaiah 30:18 says,

Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!

God has sought us out our entire lives! And one day, we will see Him again. Until then, we wait. But how do we wait? Well, we can learn from our God. We trust Him to take over, because patience and our faith in God go hand in hand. When we ask God to relieve us from our pain and suffering, we usually don’t see the results when we want to. In those times we see of our patience runs thin, or if our faith in God takes over. When we find ourselves looking back at those times after they’re over, it’s easier to see how God was there during our struggles. However, we can’t see into the future. We have no idea what tomorrow holds, and we don’t know every step of God’s plan. We don’t know what on the other side of our struggles. So instead of trying to make our own plan out of impatience, we trust God’s plan. We have faith in Him and we wait. We become patient.

I’m not sure if there’s a secret recipe to patience, but I do think that patience is a combination of waiting, our willingness to endure, and our trust in God, even though His timing may not match up with ours.

When our patience is tested, we have to remember that God’s timing is so much better than ours. We have to continue to trust our God when he tells us He is truly doing something great.

Our patience may run thin, but it is our job to be willing to endure through it with a kind heart and a steady mind.

So maybe we just need to slow down, and begin to enjoy the moment rather than rushing right through it due to impatience. Not only does patience test our willingness and perseverance, but it tests if we are able to trust our God to satisfy our very need.

When our patience runs thin, and we get angry or short-tempered, we have to pause and realize that we can trust our God and His many promises. Our God has always provided for us, and he always will.