Hurry up and wait patiently!

My Dear Friends,

We are wondering about the Fruits of the Spirit, and we have experienced Love, Shared the Joy and embraced the Peace. Today we stampede full ahead to Patience, and it is wonderful!

To grasp the Fruit which is Patience, I feel it is necessary to understand what we are called to be patient about, and what we do while we are being Patient.

Some things are urgent, and require immediate action and a quick response, even a reckless one at times. If someone is drowning, we don’t wait patiently for the tide to turn to wash them back to the shore, we may dive in and pull them to safety, putting our own life at risk as we do so.

Some things we are passionate about, and the effects of waiting may make them worse, for example Climate Change or Social injustice. I believe we are called to act with a sense of urgency.

But much of life is improved when we allow the fruit of Patience to blossom. So what are we called to be patient about?

Well, it is worth understanding what we are looking forward to. Big things like the second coming of Jesus, or us finding ourselves in heaven. Not quite such big things, like that sense of peace we were talking about last week, or that feeling of being forgiven, and then the medium sized things like being able to worship together, or finding out what it is that God is calling us to do.

The thing that unites all of these emotions and thoughts is the sense of Christian hope, and that is a powerful force. Christian hope is not some simple wish like ‘I hope it doesn’t rain later, I was planning to go on the bike’ but rather an acceptance that God’s will is going to be done, and his will is just right, and when it comes to pass it will be the best thing we could have imagined.
Christian hope is that belief that it will happen in God’s good time, not that it may happen.

So when we hope for a place in the Kingdom of heaven, when we hope that we will be forgiven, when we hope that God’s will may come to fruition, in our hearts and souls we know these things will take place, and we long for them.

The fruit of the Spirit which is Patience is accepting that God’s will for us will unfold, and we will discern it, and enact it when it is right for us to do so. We need not strive or stress, but allow the opportunities to present themselves.

Once again, our Ego can be the disrupting force, and can trick us into thinking that we know best, and want such and such a thing to happen right now! Understandable as that may be, and as convincing as it may feel, that is not the fruit of the Spirit.

Rather, we listen to God, through words of scripture, the counsel of wise folk and the answers to our prayers, and we allow the Holy Spirit to guide us, and let go of the ‘stuff’ that gets in the way, and we discover a beautiful sense of patience knowing all shall be well.

Bless you,

As ever,

Fr Marcus