“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions”-- Rainer Marie RilkeSo I was thinking about my last post and about hope and what my problem really is. I have hope in a great number of things; the return of the great Broncos, the fact that I will see Scotland someday, and that someday, somewhere, I will meet Matt Damon. It is easy to hope for those things because they are remote and removed from my deeper, more pressing heart issues.
The things that I hope for more closely seem to have an urgency about them. This sucks. The pain of living by God's timeline in 2009 is the contrary nature of instant gratification and the fact that God just doesn't work that way. We live in an instantaneous society. If we are hungry, we eat something out of our pantry. If we need five facts about Ghandi, we can google it. We live in a society designed for convenience. And in the same way, I think my patience level for the promises of hope has run out. I want it NOW, dammit. (Veruca Salt)These larger heart issues that I bring to God daily are not easy to hold onto, but neither are they easy to resolve. I believe (sometimes) that God will fulfill the promises he has made me, but I also feel that it requires more from me than just a wish and a prayer. In yearning, in pressing after these longings, I find that God is continually wanting me to be PATIENT. Do I even know how to practice patience? Apparently, (I didn't know this) the word patience in ancient Greek comes from two words meaning literally "far away" and "anger". If I think about impatience as holding onto anger, I don't really want to be impatient. But being patient (like my mom, give her a good book and she could wait for anything) and practicing patience are two different things. I think practicing patience requires us to do a couple things:
- Don't give up on what you hope for--don't just set it aside and pretend like you never wanted it just because it hasn't happened the way you wanted it to (yeah, I didn't even want to meet Matt Damon, whatever).
- Recognize your perspective--if you are telling tales in your head about why it hasn't happened or why you aren't getting what you want, recognize that you are telling a story, and that you can write really good stories in your head (my friends hate me right now because I said something to offend them and now they think I am Lame-o Mc Loserton).
- Especially recognize any stories you tell yourself that involve rejection, jealousy, or fears--these are totally unproductive and just plain mean. Those stories will bring you down like a stone.
- Identify the facts--if you are telling stories, then what is the truth? What do you know for sure? What is the word telling you?
More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.-- Romans 5:3-5
- Wait actively--don't let the waiting consume you. I am really bad at this. I get fixated on something and then like Gollum, I go towards it fiercely. "We wants the new patio chair..." "we needs a new, precious crockpot..." well, you get the idea. Waiting actively requires that you keep the hope in mind, but that you recognize what you already have. As Sheryl Crow sings, "Its not having what you want, but wanting what you've already got".
“Let nothing disturb thee; Let nothing dismay thee; All thing pass; God never changes. Patience attains All that it strives for. He who has God Finds he lacks nothing: God alone suffices.” St. Teresa of Avila
1 comment:
hi Sarah! Thank you for your sweet words. Whenever I read that first part of Romans 5, I feel like a little kid; I just want to cross my arms, stamp my foot, screw up my face, and say, "no way man, I don't rejoice in my suffering!!" and then I get to the last part with verse 5, and I'm like, "shoot. . . . he's right." How can I keep my arms crossed at the image of God's love pouring into our hearts through the free gift of the Holy Spirit?! I can't help but just let go and give thanks.
Here are the patience quotes I shared with you earlier:
"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them." - Simone Weil
In his book, Turn My Mourning into Dancing, Henri Nouwen tells the story of the parable of the ten virgins who took lamps to wait for the bridegroom. The foolish ones did not bring enough oil because they did not want to wait. Henri says, "Like them, when we cannot
make the bridegroom come soon, we will sit down in self-complaint. Then our lamps go out. We risk missing the fulfillment of our deepest desires. But the impatient desire
to bring into being great things, and the dull boredom we feel when things do not happen our way and we lose interest, shows that we have forgotten that life grows to fullness by waiting, often by suffering."
(Rebecca)
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