Category Archives: love

The Happiness of Patience

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Happiness needs Patience

Robert C. Roberts gives me food for thought in his chapter on patience in The Strength of a Christian.  I had never really connected happiness and patience before.

Patience is a condition for happiness.  Some vices are enjoyable, or at least seem so at the moment you practice them.  For example, most people get a delicious pleasure out of invidious gossip.  But other vices are just thoroughly unpleasant.  Envy, for example, is evil through and through.  Someone would have to crazy to go looking for an opportunity to be envious.

Impatience is an unpleasant vice.  It is a state of more or less intense frustration: you want to be somewhere other, or doing something other or accomplishing something other, or in the company of someone other, than you are.  Some people’s impatience is limited to certain moment, but other people are beset with impatience about large segments and pervasive situations of their life: for example the mother of small children who just can’t wait until they grow up enough to go to school and get out of her hair. These are the ones whose impatience has made them unhappy people, rather than just people with unhappy moments.

By contrast, people who can dwell gladly in the present moment despite some desire, or what would normally be a reason to desire, to depart from it–are not frustrated.  Because they exercise patience, this present moment of life is something in which to rejoice and be glad.  The impulses to flee are under control, and they experience peace and self-acceptance.

This week at lunch my host said he had a choice when he got up that morning: whether to choose to have a great day or not.  I think part of that choice is to decide to be patient, to live in this day, hour, moment with these people and circumstances.  God will be in this day; will I be attentive, patient to discover and rejoice in his presence?

How has patience and happiness overlapped for you?

The Stength of Patience

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One book that I reread is Robert C. Roberts, The Strength of a Christian.  In chapter three he gives an excellent definition and helpful wisdom on the virtue of patience.  He starts by quoting Paul’s famous chapter on love: Love is patient.  Patience gives strength to love so that we can truly love God, our neighbor and ourselves.

Patience is the ability to dwell gladly in the present moment when we have some desire  . . . to depart from it.  It takes patience to be a good duck hunter or scholar or even a good thief.  Waiting for the ducks to come near the blind may get boring, just as reading some theologians may be.  Patience is not only a Christian virtue but a virtue in the book of anybody who understands human life. 

Our life is full of beckonings from the future: The future says, “Come away from where you are; you are not moving fast enough, not accomplishing enough, not getting what you set out to get.  And is it not a bit boring where you are, and unpleasant and annoying in other ways? Come away, come away.”  And so a craftsman rushes his job, or the scholar lays aside the volume of Moltmann’s theology.  Some people are so deficient in patience that they flit from task to task or from entertainment to entertainment, never doing anything well or enjoying anything deeply.

Patience is a form of self-mastery that enables us to dwell in the present moment, to stay at the present task, to narrow our focus of vision so that our mind is not sundered by every passing impulse to quit the present and fly away.

Patience leads to strength and strength to patience

Roberts goes on to examine how we can achieve such self-mastery in our Christian lives.  I confess that I am struggling with patience as I work my physical therapy exercises.  I hope to run again and perhaps train for a marathon.  But all I can do is repeat over and over and over and over the exercises that my PT has given me.   I also need patience as I pastor in a new congregation, learning God’s story and culture within this great congregation.   So I am rereading and reflecting on Robert’s book.   I will share more in the coming week.

How and when have you learned patience and what role did God play in the learning?

Papa in Heaven

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Brother David and Grandnephew Troy

I saw this picture of my brother with his first grandchild and proud PAPA jumped to mind.  It seemed to fit with last night’s confirmation class on the Lord’s Prayer.   The prayer’s introduction, Our Father in heaven, became special when I learned that Jesus used the word “abba” for father.  It was a term of endearment, more like “daddy” or “papa.”  “Father” seems a bit stiff.  

The power of the Abba prayer came home to me in a strange way when I was in college.  I was home for Christmas break and wanted to get a Christmas gift for the family.  I had recently been introduced to C. S. Lewis and thought that a box set of The Chronicles of Narnia would be a good gift, but I had no money.   I decided to pray about it and ask God to help.  As I entered the Christian bookstore, I was asking God to provide me the money so that I could buy the books.  I picked out the books, got in line for the cash register, waiting, hoping for some miracle.  How was God going to intervene?  A stranger noticing my need, cash on the floor?   But as I waited in line, nothing seemed to happen.  When I finally reached the register, I stepped out of line and put the books back.   I was deeply disappointed that God had not helped me.

The Christian bookstore was directly across from the offices were my dad worked for a local newspaper.   I walked across the street to see if he was there.   He was and he asked me how I was doing.  I am not sure now exactly how the conversation went, but somehow I asked for a few dollars and he gave me enough to buy the books.   Abba had provided after all, just not the way I expected.

The lesson I learned that day was that prayer is not magic, but a relationship.  There are Christians who have their prayers answered in miraculous, amazing ways.  I tend not to be one of them.  Instead, God uses the means around me to provide for my daily bread and to save me from the time of trial.  Papa in Heaven is at work through my brothers and sister who live here on earth.  And that also means that at times I may be God’s answer to someone else’s prayer.  And I thank God that I am one of His beloved children who can call him Papa.

How have you experienced Papa‘s answer to prayer?

Apples and Friends

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Is Your Apple Finished?

Yesterday’s I mentioned my childhood friend, David Brown, and our logging adventures.  Our friendship had many ups and downs.    He was bigger and more athletic than I was and so he was often selected for playground teams when I was not.  I thrived in the classroom, where he often struggled.  On most days these differences did not bother us. We were best friends.  Occasionally, however, we get into intense disagreements over trivial matters. 

I remember the day my mom gave us each an apple to eat.  I ate my apple down to the core, savoring every bite.  David nibbled around the outside and said it was finished.

 I said, “Your apple isn’t finished.  You barely started.”

“Oh, my apple is done.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Yes it is!” 

He stormed off home and I swore we would never be friends again.  But the next morning, I stopped at his house on the way to school and we picked up as if nothing happened, until the next argument erupted.

In Simply Christianity, N. T. Wright describes our hunger and deep desire for relationships and yet our daily struggle to make our relationships work.  Wright writes, “We are made for each other.  Yet making relationships work, let alone making them flourish, is often remarkably difficult.  We all know that we belong to communities, that we were made to be social creatures. Yet there are many times when we are tempted to slam the door and stomp off into the night by ourselves, simultaneously  making a statement that we don’t belong anymore and that we want someone to take pity on us , to come to the rescue and comfort us.  We all know we belong in relationships, but we can’t quite work out how to get them right.  The voice we hear echoing in our heads and our hearts reminding us of both parts of this paradox and its worth pondering”  (p. 30). He goes on to suggest that the “echo” we are experiencing is the love God created us to experience with God and our neighbor, but our human sin has clouded and twisted our capacity to give and receive love.

How have you struggled in your relationships? How has God been faithful?