Exhibiting More Patience: Two Distinct Types

One of the golden virtues is patience. A close cousin of tolerance, and also trust, patience is more than a virtue -- it’s a whole system of thought and being. And we see very little of it in the 21st Century. In fact the world has grown tired of patience. The whole truth is this: patience has never come natural and easily to anyone; not now, and not a thousand years ago. No one is born patient. It’s essentially human drives that distort whatever patience we might have. Greed and laziness (which are but two examples) will force Godly patience into submission.

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I observed recently that patience has two distinct forms and levels. There is normal life patience that we’re all expected to exercise and there’s also the extraordinary patience that we have countless opportunities to show every day, but we either don’t see them, or don’t care for them.

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Normal life patience trips us up. When we don’t have it, it reveals our cranky, frustrated characters. It’s queuing and waiting and having to go without. It’s being in physical, mental, and emotional pain and wanting it to cease because it’s painful. It’s not sticking to the diet program in order to lose the prescribed amount of weight. It’s also not waiting for someone to finish what they’re saying before we launch into ‘response mode.’ It might even be getting cranky with our kids -- realistically, there is never an excuse for losing our patience with our children -- the “adult” response is patient. “Retail therapy” is a construct of behaviour borne of a lack of patience. The patient do not borrow against exorbitant interest and spend their lifetimes in debt. They don’t give up on eating healthy and exercising for their health’s benefit. They understand how to queue and also how to endure pain. They also exercise patience dealing with children. All of these situations are normally manifested as patience or impatience in the midst of normal life.

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Extraordinary patience is totally different. It’s the stuff of blessing. Most people recognise it in the Mother Teresa’s of the world, but wouldn’t know it in their own lives if they fell over it. It’s deliberately holding back for someone else’s advantage. It’s when someone donates a kidney to someone they don’t know. It’s giving the last $200 you have to someone even needier. It’s disguised as kindness and generosity, and mostly manifested in the guise of rejecting time pressure; it’s the opposite of competitiveness. It is patience. It’s grace at its best. This virtue is based of course in love. Love is always big, volumous, and massive. It’s wanting as much for the other as for self. Trust and tolerance, respect and humility -- it’s all patience, based fundamentally in strength of faith.

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There can’t be a more important character function than patience. If we’re tested, it’s our patience that goes through the fiery furnace to be found either true or wanting. We all have our limits of patience. And it’s our life purpose to grow in patience; to grow in both varieties of patience.

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These two types of patience fit on different continuums; they have similar qualities, but completely different values. The ‘extraordinary patience continuum’ sits a long way above the ‘normal life patience continuum.’ This is because the former is borne of true love (the heavenly realm) whereas the latter is borne from a motive of conforming to worldly expectations. Both forms of patience however, are equally important. On these patience continuums, where do you sit on each one respectively?

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Copyright © 2008, Steven John Wickham. All Rights Reserved Worldwide.