We laugh at the joke told of the woman who came forward for prayer. When asked why she needed prayer, she said, she wanted God to give her the gift of patience and she wanted it right now! When Dave was recently in hospital, he was told he would need patience and determination to recover. He told the nurse he had plenty of determination, but sometimes struggled with patience! We all tend to struggle to embody patience and find this virtue difficult to practise: I am typing this on a notebook and it’s taking much longer than normal which I find irksome, to say the least!
It remains true, however, that patience comes through the trials we endure (see James 1:2-3, Rom 5:3-4). We learn patience because we have to. There is simply no alternative. The pregnant woman has to wait for the baby to arrive, and no amount of fretting can alter that fact. The impatient child has to wait for Christmas to come. When I was a child, I would frequently feel ill as Christmas approached because I was so excited, but that didn’t actually alter the speed at which 25th December would arrive each year! If we don’t learn patience, all we do is make ourselves miserable in the now, which is God’s most precious gift to us.
The word often translated patience in our Bibles is the Greek word hupomone, a word which conveys the need to persevere and endure through difficult circumstances. William Barclay said, ‘Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.’ Rom 8:25 reminds us ‘But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.’ As we practise patience, often through tears and gritted teeth, we can also learn to do so joyfully because of the hope God gives us.