PATIENCE OBTAINS ALL THINGS

PATIENCE OBTAINS ALL THINGS

JANUARY 29, 2018

We are in our Fruit of the Spirit series. We have done love, joy, and peace. Today we are going to look at patience. I have so much material to cover I know I'm never going to get through all of this, so you might look for another video this week I'm just going to jump right in because we have no time to waste.

I want to start with what patience is. It's interesting, I think, because the word patience actually comes from the same word that passion comes from, like the Passion of Christ. It comes from a term that also means to suffer long or long-suffering. They both have the same root. It has to do with endurance. Specifically when we talk about patience we mean that patience is the willing endurance of what is painful or difficult for us. You may be naturally patient. You may be one of those people who does not struggle with patience at all. I am not one of those people. But if you are, you probably have a much more pleasant time of life than those who are like me and are irritable and impatient.

Patience is a good quality even apart from religious motives. It's just a good thing. In fact, we would probably say, and this is the title of the show, that patience is a mark of spiritual maturity. We value the mature because they are usually far more patient than some of us. What we are doing is we are suffering for God's sake everything that is painful, and we are doing so willingly. That can be physical as well as moral and spiritual suffering. We're trying to bear patiently things like bodily pain or poverty and sickness. When I say poverty I don't mean complete destitution, I mean not really having as much as you need or think you need. I don't mean a complete destitution but a simplicity, in fact a very pruned simplicity depending on our state in life. Sorrow, desolation, grief, loss of friends, rudeness, calumny, misrepresentation, insults, ingratitude, injuries, persecutions, contempt, neglect, all of that comes under the umbrella of patience if we are willing to endure it for the sake of the Lord.

We all need patience. I mentioned that it is a mark of the spiritually mature. I'm not just saying that of my own opinion, although I think we could probably look at those people around us who are the most patient and see that they usually are, if they are truly patient and not just spiritually or emotionally lazy, the most mature. Sometimes we call that wisdom. We will see in a moment that the Bible sort of approaches it in that way. I love what St. James says in his letter. He says "My brothers, count it all joy when you fall into various trials." I think that hysterical. We're going to tiptoe through the tulips in happiness when we suffer. But listen to what he says "Count it all joy when you fall into various trials knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. Let patience have its perfect work that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." When the Bible talksa bout the word perfect it means complete or mature, spiritually speaking. Spiritual maturity, St. James says, proceeds from patience. We learn patience by the things that we suffer. In fact, Jesus himself, the book of Hebrews says, learned obedience from the things he suffered. Patience is a necessary virtue. We need it. It's fruit of the spirit. It's actually part of the evidence that we have the Holy Spirit, because the Holy Spirit will produce patience in us if we continually follow him.

Just from the root of the word, Biblical patience implies suffering, or endurance, or waiting. It's a determination of the will and not simply because it's necessary. If we're waiting because we have to but we're complaining and chafing the whole time then that's not really patience. That's you just

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having no choice. Patience is an essential Christian virtue. The Bible is full of how we are supposed to wait patiently for God to endure without complaint all of those sufferings and wrongs and evils that we meet with. In fact, Jesus went through those in the Beatitudes, we saw, which is where joy comes from. The suffering of these things for God's sake and for love of him produces both patience and joy, and they proceed from charity. So all of it, you see, work together. That's why we call it the fruit of the spirit rather than the fruits, plural.

We're going to bear patiently injustices that we can't fix ourselves, or maybe a provocation that we can't remove ourselves. In the Old Testament the word patience doesn't even occur. We have several exhortations or wait or to expect. Hope actually implies patience too, and we'll see in a moment that comes from the book of Romans. St. Paul talks about that a lot in the New Testament. In the Old Testament it's mostly to wait with expectation or hope. We see it in Ecclesiastes and especially in the book of Job. Job is a paragon, we say, of patience. I was actually considering that we might do a whole study on Job. I think that would be great. That would be a great study on the whys of suffering and how to bear up under suffering. I'll wait to hear from you if that's something you want to do but I think that's a great idea. We'll see. In the Old Testament it's mostly the idea of suffering for a long time, or endurance. In the New Testament it also has that idea but we see that word translated into the word patience quite a bit for us, or steadfastness. It's like to plant your feet and not be moved. In fact, it's an act of the will, to be perfectly honest. None of us are naturally patient, especially if you're like me with my personality and temperament everything makes you impatient. You can see that I'm not the slightest bit spiritually mature when I get aggravated behind the wheel of a car or in all of those ways that are just irritations. Trust me, as I was preparing for this particular show it just comes home to me on a daily basis that impatience is one of the most idiotic of all the faults. It gains nothing for us. It doesn't relieve the suffering it all, it just aggravates it because you're dwelling on the irritation. No one enjoys any peace as long as she is yielding to those feelings of impatience. I get discontented and I'm miserable and uneasy. I find absolutely intolerable what I could just bear if I would just make the effort and just suck up the irritation or suppress that response that is irritable or angry.

People who are impatient are always in this uneasy attitude. They're a nuisance. They're an aggravation to everybody around them. Nobody respects someone who is impatient. It's actually pretty ridiculous. When you think about how silly it is, it's laughable. We fume over some trifle and we get aggravated because we can't overcome some difficulty or have our own way. People who are impatient make a bad impression, don't they? I have to say, I actually get tickled because nothing makes me more aggravated than an inanimate object that will not do what it is supposed to do. Tech problems, and listen, don't even get me started if I'm hungry. My husband, if I start getting irritable, always asks me "Have you eaten?" It's that hangry word, that Snickers commercial "You're not you when you're hungry." Trust me, I am not. We all suffer with it; some of us more than others, I probably more than anyone. That just really came home to me as I was studying for this particular show.

We know what patience is. Why do we need patience? We know that there is no lack of opportunity to exercise patience. On a daily basis I experience stuff that aggravates and irritates me. Patience, then, is not simply the outward expression of irritation. It's also the inward ? the complaining, the murmuring, the uneasiness on the inside, that provocation that makes you want to respond. It's both outward and inward. We'll look at that a little more in just a few moments. The truth is we live in a valley of tears, as the Memorare prayer says. I don't know about you, but I find the little irritations and the things that make me impatient harder to deal with than the big things. Maybe that's just

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because I haven't experienced a big enough big thing, I don't know. I tend to rise to the occasion when things are tragic or catastrophic or emergency situations, or even protracted. When my son had his accident and almost died in the hospital, even that for months and months while he tried to recover and how difficult it was for our family, I did much better with that than I tend to do with small things. I believe that's a mark of my temperament and personality, but also spiritual immaturity. That's just what it is.

Next we are going to look at divine patience, trials of patience, degrees of patience, Biblical company, and finally the fruit of patience. Patience has great value in that it brings about spiritual maturity if we understand what it really is. It's not just the self-control of not acting out, it's also the self-control of the spiritual and emotional self-discipline of bearing the wrong and difficulty on purpose and willingly ? to willingly bear or endure some difficulty or pain or offense. I love that St. Francis de Sales feast day was this week because he is so good at pointing out the value of the duty of our daily vocation in whatever it is as long as it is not holy orders. We think a lot of times that holy orders or religious orders are truly the only way to be holy, but St. Francis de Sales was so good about pointing out that no, there is such a thing as the "sacrament of the present moment." What he means is there is grace available in every present moment when we offer it to God, especially in those moments of suffering. If we do not rebel against all of those things that test our faith and test our patience, they can save us. They cause us to grow and mature. As long as we submit to them, they are not evil or even misfortunes, they are a great benefit to each of us. There is great value in the things we suffer. We know that as a Catholics. We are great at suffering but we don't do it joyfully, usually. We are like the Pharisees, we want everybody to see our long face and know that we're offering it all up to Jesus, right?

I'm not talking about situations of true grief. That's a process and we have to go through that and work through it and yield do it in all of its stages, the anger, the denial, all of that. I know there is no choice in grief but we'll see the Catechism actually speaks to family very beautifully when it says in CCC 2447. It talks about how bearing wrongs patiently is a spiritual work of mercy. Bearing those wrongs, especially in the family, is a work of charity. Charity in itself, it says in 1825 is patient. That's because God himself is divinely patient. I want to look at that just a little bit, because when we talk about the patience of God we usually use the word in a different meaning than we use it for ourselves, and that's unfortunate. It just means that God refrains from inflicting on the sinner the punishment that the sinner deserves. He's long-suffering. He does it because he is waiting to see if he (the sinner) will repent and turn to him. He's slow to anger and of great mercy, the Scriptures say. It's not that God doesn't know whether the person will repent, it's that he's giving the opportunity. I just did a little segment with Spirit Radio in the Midwest today on the book of Amos. Truly, these prophets. It is this oppressive sense of God and his justice. He sends these prophets in to warn the people. You better straighten up or you're not going to like what happens. Because it's from the Old Testament it has this very punitive feeling to it. And it should, really. My mama used to tell me all the time "You better be sure your sin will find you out." That comes from the Scriptures themselves. Galatians says so and also the Old Testament. God is not mocked. You will reap what you sow.

When the prophets offer this word of God to the people, what they are doing is revealing God's patience. God sends the prophets one right after the other to warn the people before the consequences of their sins come to its fullness. He wants them to repent before they fall never to recover again, sometimes. In fact, what we see in the people of God is that what happened. There was a split in the kingdom and 10 of the tribes went north and 2 of the tribes went south, and the 10 tribes up north, Jeroboam the king who split the kingdom, set up his own altars and worship and

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priesthood and sacrifices. He set all that up illegitimately up north. He didn't want the people traveling to Jerusalem because Jerusalem was where the temple was. To keep his people, those 10 tribes, up north with him so that he could rule them and they wouldn't desire the beauties of the temple in the south, he set up his own sort of system of worship, and it was completely illegitimate. I've talked about this before, and I do it a lot in my new study Fulfilled, I give you the whole history of how that happens and how it was the most egregious affront to God in the entire Bible, this split. My point is that God sent prophet after prophet after prophet to call the people to repentance so they weren't punished in the full measure that they truly deserved. That shows his long-suffering, his patience. In fact, he did that all the time. It wasn't just with his people in that split, the "Great Apostasy" it is sometimes called, but in the flood when he prophesized the flood. When he went to Noah and told him there was going to be a flood, he waited 100 years before it actually came to pass. Noah was faithful. He was building that ark for 100 years, obeying God, and it had never even rained. He was obedient to God's word but still God waited that century to try to bring the people to repentance. He gave them plenty of time. Saul forfeited his kingdom by his disobedience but God waited 10 years before he carried out that sentence. What's interesting is in that time David's formation was taking place. While Saul was experiencing God's patience with his sin and while God was giving Saul plenty of time to repent, he was already preparing Saul's replacement. That shows the economy of God as well in using a period of time for one thing for one person and another thing for another person. It could actually mean that several parties are involved. Often they are, we know those circumstances. In fact, I gave you an example with my son and his moving out last week when we talked about peace.

This is actually a great example. When we talk about patience, God is never in a hurry. He is showing us, then, that we should be very deliberate in everything that we do. The things that provoke us to impatience are really a call to care and deliberation before we act. We don't usually leave any sort of interval of time as God does between the wrong that has been done and the punishment. We're just impulsive. We get mad or whatever and we commit lots of faults that we probably could avoid if we would just wait. This is why I had peace in what was happening with my son and my husband. It really didn't have a whole lot to do with me. I was at fault as well but the actual confrontation occurred between my husband and my son. It was a matter of patience for me, and truly long-suffering, because I suffered. It was difficult not to get involved because the confrontation happened between them. I had to refrain and wait. I had to refrain from speaking to my husband about what he should or should not do or how he was right or wrong. We discussed it, I'm not saying we didn't discuss it, but I did not tell him what he needed to do. I commiserated with him when he talked about how my son did wrong in this and this and this and we talked about how he was complicit in the whole confrontation, but I didn't say anything necessarily about how my husband acted. I didn't have the opportunity to do that with my son either because he was away, but I didn't contact him. I didn't send him a text message and ask where he was. I didn't send him an email or a phone call and say "When are you coming home?" I didn't do any of that. I just let it sit and ste so that everybody involved could take the time they needed to decide what the right thing to do was. Even in me that took 5 or 6 days for me, who wasn't involved in the actual confrontation, to see my own fault in contributing to how my son felt. I was doing the same thing. I had fallen into that pattern of criticism and it wasn't working. He had outgrown that sort of correction but I was still doing it and so was his father. It was very difficult to let that time pass without jumping back into the action.

That's really what Jesus did during the passion. He allowed the events to take him where they would take him. He laid himself completely into God's hands through other people who would abuse and eventually murder him. He did so out of that patience, that passion. God doesn't need time for

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deliberation but he gives us that time, that patience, that long-suffering, to bring us to repentance in order to teach us that it is necessary to be slow to act, especially in anger. God always presents himself as waiting. That is a habit that we should really get into. When we are provoked ? and I learned this the hard way through email, you get angry and you want to flip off an email and then you've done it and you can't bring it back. When there's a confrontation and you want to say something and you want to jump back into the action but God says, "No, I want you to wait. I want you to be patient." And it is difficult.

I'd like to say a public thank you to Liz and Deborah, my latest Friends of the Show. I appreciate how you love and lift me. That's always my goal, to love and lift you a little bit so that you can love and lift all you've been given.

Patience, we've seen, is tried by everything that puts an obstacle in the way of acting. Sometimes we're being kept waiting, maybe at a dentist or doctors office, or ? and this happens to me all the time as a homeschooler ? by having to repeat over and over again some lesson to somebody who is maybe not paying attention or just not able to grasp yet a particular lesson. Also, the wayward conduct of our kids, by being interrupted when we're speaking or when we have something we want to say. A hundred similar incidents occur every single day that are trials of our patience. We are also tried by people who misunderstand and even misrepresent us on purpose. It's not easy to think kindly about those kind of people. We want to either avoid them or show them how we dislike them or how upset we are with them, and especially we really want to get them back. This is how we can gauge how well or how badly we possess the virtue of patience, is in these situations. That's just some things. You've gone poverty, sickness, desolation, loneliness; you've got unappealing surroundings or jobs that aren't to your taste. James tells us, though, that those sufferings, although they may be minor, contribute to our salvation. In fact, that's a great mystery of suffering. Does God want to repay our good with evil by sending suffering to us? Especially when we begin to really pray that we want to follow God and we want to grow in our faith and then suddenly all hell breaks loose and everything falls to pieces, and we feel that God has punished us for having that desire but instead he's giving us the thing that is going to answer that prayer. It's very hard to see that for ourselves when we are in the middle of it because it's hard and painful.

If we feel sometimes that God is repaying our good with evil by sending suffering to us, we should just look at the saints. They themselves do not believe God is punishing them. They welcome sufferings. They like suffering. What do I mean by that? I don't mean we're throwing a party for all the suffering that we experience. Just because we recognize the value in suffering doesn't mean we like it any better. It doesn't make it less painful, less distasteful, anything like that, but it does make it easier to take when we know that God is answering our prayers and that the end result is going to be the thing we're looking for. It's like a doctor or surgeon who cuts the cancer out. You're in pain and something has been hacked away from your physical body and you undergo all of the difficulty in healing, but if he did not take it out it would kill you. It's sort of that same idea. In the beginning, remember, there wasn't any suffering. It wasn't until the angels rebelled that pain and suffering entered the universe. Because it is part of the payment for sin ? the book of Romans says that the wages of sin is death ? every sin whether it is major or minor brings a little death with it. That is to teach us to choose better, partly. Nebuchadnezzar, he was proud and afterward when he suffered he became humble and submissive. You've got the prodigal son. You've got Ahab who was humbled by his suffering. "It is good, O Lord" says King David, "that you have afflicted me. Before I was troubled I went wrong but now I have kept your word." Hebrews 12:11 says "Chastisement yields to those who are exorcised by

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