Patience

“Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. You also, be patient. Establish your hearts.” – James 4:7-8

It is difficult to bear the waiting of this time. There’s so much we don’t know. There’s so much we can’t have. We have to wait longer for smaller things like package deliveries and library books, and bigger things like schooling details and career plans. We are constantly having to defer longings or readjust expectations. And that is hard. The word for “patient” here is literally “to bear suffering long.” Suffering is implied.

French author Simone Weil wrote in her notebooks: “Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” James here is talking about the coming of Jesus, but sometimes I think all of life is that waiting. In my waiting for everything else is my waiting for Jesus: for the consummation of the hopes, expectations and desires that I can’t help but have. Learning how to live in the already-but-not-yet.

We’ve passed a lot of farms in our travels lately: unending fields of wheat, onions, potatoes, corn. There is rarely anything happening that we can see. But the promise is there, I suppose. And there are small signs of activity: sprinklers going, tractors driving. Patience is not passive, but active. It means, as Nouwen writes, “to enter actively into the thick of life and to fully bear the suffering within and around us. Patience is the capacity to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell as fully as possible the inner and outer events of our lives.”

This is hard. I mostly want to flee or to fight. To escape the wait by distracting myself from my hopes or abandoning them altogether, or to rail against it and batter out my own way. But that is not Jesus’ way. His life, one long wait for the cross, was full of activity. He entered fully into the suffering around him, in such a way that it all became a part of what he eventually did at the cross and in his resurrection. Our waiting too will one day become part of the joy. But until then, we must be patient.