I Need Patience - NOW!

Patience… How many of you consider yourselves to be very patient people?  I try, but sometimes I feel like I may have been there on the day they were handing it out, but I probably left because the line was too long!

Patience is what the apostle Paul called a spiritual gift, one of the “fruit of the spirit” right up there with joy, peace, love, kindness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). And yet it remains one of the most challenging qualities for us to embody, especially in a world that reveres instant gratification.

Patience is important because impatience is self-sabotaging. Think about it, pretty much every action we take that is driven by impatience is ineffective and often destructive. When we’re impatient we say things we wish we hadn’t said, we hurt others’ feelings, we perform less efficiently, we make more mistakes, and our impatience makes us unhappy and frustrated the entire time.

I doubt there is even one area of our lives that doesn’t need our patience for it to be the best it can be: relationships, job hunting, school, waiting for healing or test results, gardening, cooking, art, our spiritual journeys.

In our guiding scripture for today, James 5:7-8a, the author writes of the farmer, waiting for their precious crop. If you know anything about farming, you know that the farmer’s patience is not passive; it is an active trust. The farmer prepares the ground, sows the seed, and tends the field in expectation of a harvest that cannot be rushed. So too, in our spiritual lives, patience asks us to act with hope and faith, even when we don’t see immediate results. Just as the farmer trusts the process, we must trust the unfolding of our journeys, especially when the answers we seek don’t come quickly.

This wisdom can be expanded to encompass just about any challenge we face in our lives.

The ancient wisdom story of “The Lion’s Whisker” tells the tale of an Ethopian woman who marries a widower with a young son. The woman is thrilled to be a mother, but the boy rejects her food, her mending and her kindness. Eventually, the woman seeks help from the hermit who lives on the nearby mountain. She asks him to make her a potion so that her stepson will love her.

The hermit agrees, but, he says, “the ingredients are very difficult to obtain. You must bring me the whisker of a living lion.”

The woman is distressed, but not to be thwarted. She spends many weeks gaining the trust of a lion until she can finally cut a whisker from his chin. She takes this back to the hermit, ecstatic that she has accomplished her task and will now receive the potion that will make her stepson love her.

The hermit takes the whisker and examines it closely agreeing that it is authentic. Then he throws it in the fire.

“What have you done?” the woman cries. “You don’t know how hard it was to obtain. It has taken me months to win the trust of the lion!”

“Can the love and trust of a child be harder to obtain than that of a wild beast?” he asked her. “Go home and think on what you have done.” The woman returned home and slowly, with love and patience, won the trust and love of her stepson.

In addition to patience, it took courage, perseverance, gentleness, and consistency for the woman to accomplish something that seemed almost impossible. And yet, the story (made up though it may be) offers us the deep truth of the power of patience.

Sharon Brous, in her book Amen, tells the story of Derek Black who grew up as the son of the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and was a fervent believer in the lies of white Christian nationalism. Black attended a liberal arts college and when classmates discovered his identity, he was shunned by everyone but one young man, a religious Jew who invited him for Shabbat dinner. Later Black stated, “He doubted that he was going to convince me of anything, he just wanted to let me see [the] Jewish community… so that if I was going to keep saying these [antisemitic] things that at least I had seen real jews.”

I can’t even imagine the tension at that Shabbat table, a sacred time meant to reconnect to God, family, faith and history, now attended by a person whose core identity was rotting in violent, toxic racism and antisemitism. But, as Brous tells the story, “One dinner led to the next. A few other Jewish students joined… they discussed and debated. For every study Black cited, attempting to prove racial superiority, they’d counter with ‘150 more recent, more well researched studies.’’’ They discussed and argued until Black would have to concede that his argument didn’t hold together. After a year or two of dissecting Black’s beliefs, he finally got to a point where he didn’t believe the propaganda he was raised with anymore. Black called it a “gradual awakening” to the harm he had caused.”

What did it take for those young Jewish men to face such deep-rooted hatred week after week? What kind of patience did it take not to give up after a time or two? And do we simply toss this out as a rare occurrence, or do we use it as a shining example and tell ourselves that if they could do it, why couldn’t we?

As we go through our weeks, perhaps we could look at the areas in our lives in which we desire change. If we apply patience (including patience with ourselves) to our approach in creating change, what might that look like? In what situations or relationships would we like to build trust and love?

All of this begs the question, how do we practice patience? Here are a few suggestions for… every one begins with personal awareness of when we need patience and when we are losing our patience:

• Get enough sleep!
• Accept what we can’t control
• Shift perspective – see the situation as a chance to pause, reflect, learn something new
• Remember that an immediate reply to text or email isn’t always necessary – wait
• Take a deep breath instead of swearing
• Count to 10

Patience is not a quick fix. With patience, we are invited to grow deeper, to trust harder, and to love more gently. With patient wisdom like the farmer, and courageous, gentle patience of the woman with the lion’s whisker, and the compassionate patience of the Jewish students, may we too grow in patience, discovering the transformation and gifts it has to offer.

Love & Light!

Kaye