Patience
The Bible presents patience and love as inseparable virtues that strengthen and define each other.
1 Corinthians 13:4 begins Paul’s famous description of love with:
- “Love is patient, love is kind…” Patience isn’t just associated with love - it’s the very first characteristic Paul mentions, suggesting it’s fundamental to what love actually is.
We must have patience since:
- We are finite
- God is infinite
Ephesians 4:2 instructs:
- Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.
Patience means the capacity of calm endurance, the ability to put up with a lot over a long period of time, without complaining, at least too much. Patience also means tolerant understanding. True patience is based on an understanding that is above our purely human level of understanding. And patience also implies forgiveness, which means to excuse for fault or offense, it means to pardon.
Saint Francis de Sales (1567 - 1622) said:
- Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself.
And Plato famously said:
- A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.
For me, now, patience is just fine. I have earned the right to be here and I truly enjoy the view.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said:
- Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is life that; one stitch at a time taken patiently, and the pattern will come out all right, like embroidery.
One step at a time.
Patience