Lent: Give Up Impatience

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant

- 1 Corinthians 13:4

My children own a book called Waiting is Not Easy by Mo Willems. It tells the story of Piggy asking Elephant to wait for a special surprise, which ends up being a magnificent starry sky after waiting for the sun to go down. No matter how anxious and frustrated Elephant gets for having to wait so long, Piggy can’t make the sun set any faster nor time move any quicker. We’ve been waiting for COVID-19 to abate. We’ve been waiting for politics to change. We wait for doctors to give their opinion and then we wait for treatments to work. We wait for the tax consultant to file. We wait for family to call. We wait for a moment of peace. We wait for war to end. We wait for love. We continue to wait for Christ. But waiting is not easy.

The patience referred to in 1 Corinthians is about having patience with one another and with God. The community is fighting and angry with each other. Folks are suing each other. Paul asks the community members to have patience, not just any kind of patience, but the patience of love. And not just any love, but the love of Christ. This love is not just deep affection, but hopeful affection and promised fulfillment. To start with the love of Christ reminds us of the life that Christ lived, one that walked with others. We are reminded of the death of Christ, a death that was sad, confusing, and overwhelming. We are reminded of the resurrection of Christ, and that no matter how dark those three days of his death were, the sun still rose, the stars still shone, and what we feared and what we were perhaps impatient for still happened.

The patience that we gain from love is not just simply waiting, but a space for us to live out that hope in action and in words. Patience in the light of Christ’s love is Grace lived out in our lives individually and together. And so, impatience is the denial of this opportunity and this call upon our lives. Waiting is not easy, but neither is faith. The harder thing, waiting, faith, patience, this we can do in the strength of God. Let us pray for that strength; that when we give up impatience, God will lead us to live out that Grace as we wait and hope.


- Pastor Tim

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