I waited patiently for the Lord;
– Psalm 40:1-4
He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure.
He put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear,
and put their trust in the Lord.
Blessed is the man who makes
the Lord his trust.
This week, we’ve looked at the deadly sin of anger (Latin: ira) the corresponding virtues of patience (Latin: patientia; principal) and faith (theological). At first glance, this may be an odd grouping; however, peeling through even just the surface layers shows an intimate connectedness between these three. In short, faith grants us patience which stems wrath.
Reflection Story:
Call Me Patient, Watch Me Laugh
I had an interesting conversation with my mother.
I’d been actively searching for work for a year, and we have been both baffled and frustrated by my lack of success. As someone who finds great fulfillment in work, I sincerely and deeply want to work, and I’ve been working hard and pulling long hours to find work. I do things far outside of my comfort zone on a frequent basis, such as networking, cold calling and emailing, and even asking others for help. (Gasp!) My to-do lists running long with tasks both tedious and arduous, I managed to accomplish everything each day, and I still felt like I was failing because there’s nothing concrete to show for my efforts. I often feel like a failure. Yet, every morning, I get back up and do something to try to achieve this goal.
After a year of this, I suffered from a most quizzical and even more frustrating setback: I was not hired for a job within my field that I was well (and overly) qualified for despite the hiring group clearly needed many more recruits. I literally called it (to myself) my “safety” position, referencing the college a high schooler applies to just in case they don’t make it into their stretch school or second-best-on-paper university, and was rejected from it. I was rejected from my safety spot.
After a year of plowing forward, and pushing for the end goal, and working hard for apparently-naught, and pulling long hours without a paycheck, and still getting rejected from this position, for a minute, I was ready to give up. I felt like an unemployable schmuck. As I closely tie my identity to the work I get done, this was a devastating blow. Finally confessing my frustration to my mother, she replied with something I didn’t expect to hear:
You have a lot of patience.
– Mom
Patience. I had been working so hard and for so long with no results, I certainly didn’t feel patient; I felt like I had wasted a year’s worth of energy, a year’s worth of peace, and a year’s worth of time. How many other things I could have accomplished in that time had I known that they were all dead ends!
Yet I push on. Even still, out on “vacation,” I continue to work and network, even packing a suit in case of the off-chance last minute interview. I have some sort of intrinsic faith that the process will work out if I keep at it. Why? Maybe I’m afraid of langoliers, but most of the time I’m moving forward in peaceful determination.
How? Why?
I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
– Jeremiah 29:11
Every time I come to my wit’s end, I run into Jeremiah. It might be via seeing a sign during a stroll down the street or listening to a song on the radio, but the timing is always just right. The verse refuels me and I crawl up my rope. The verse alone is powerless; what gives it influence is the trust that I have in its truth. What gives the verse power is faith.
But why do I trust in the Lord? I can list of a number of “coincidences” in my life, not the least of which being my survival through some pretty opaque circumstances. I can delineate a number of times when I didn’t have the courage, strength, patience, fortitude, intellect, foresight, humility, or kindness to properly move forward, yet something great happened through me despite (or because of) my weakness. I also have a list of “narrow escapes” of goals I had my heart set on that I was detoured from which led others to destruction. However, being human, these things only have due meaning when I reflect on them, and I don’t often do so. Think about it: when’s the last time you reflected on a narrow escape from two decades ago, or even an annoying red light that kept you from being in a traffic accident last week?
This is substantiating evidence, but it only substantiates faith already established. I could write off everything if I wanted to, but that wouldn’t make sense: I’m a scientist – an engineer – after all; I don’t throw away data. Armed with an arsenal of facts, the path starts to reveal itself; even if the next few steps aren’t clear, hindsight is still 20/20.
Every time I stop to evaluate the data, I’m filled with a sense of peace because they all seem to be leading in a particular direction: away from this, nearer there but tangentially, way away from that. There’s a pattern. I’m still puzzling it out, but when I look at the last decade (or even longer), there’s a clear pattern.
Patience and Faith
I again humbly assert that I don’t find myself to be particularly patient, but I am getting better. My level of patience is clearly directly tied to my level in faith: faith in the system, faith in people, faith that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. My trust in all of these things can be shaken, though; the system, people, and my own actions have all let me down at times. Everything manmade is fallible.
In contrast, when I’ve placed my faith in God, I haven’t been let down. Faith and patience go hand-in-hand; humans are more and more a people of “now” whereas God seems to smile at our restlessness. So we wait diligently in faith, and we’re rewarded for our efforts. The results may be unexpected, but it shines a light on a better option; the road may be frightening, but traversing it shows us our own strength and leads to more than we dare hope for.
Countering Anger
With faith and patience, it’s a lot easier to not get upset about things. With an eye to the future, we can see not only the consequences of our actions, but those of the actions of others, and the power of God in the overarching plan. This isn’t to say “karma,” though karma is a biblical principle; rather, we place trust in God that He will ensure things will turn out the way they are meant to.
The more faith we place in God, the less ground there is to be shaken beneath our feet because God never fails. He does things in a divine way, not a human way, so we don’t always understand the path, but He always gets us where we’re supposed to go, where we need to be, where we flourish. Holding on to that trust in God, we know that, in the overall picture, whatever we’re going through has a purpose. Having faith in purposefulness enables us to accept difficult times, situations, and actions instead of getting upset.
Before you roll your eyes, this concept is gaining recognition in the secular world. Purpose in the working world is seen as a “secret weapon,” often ignored yet increasing returns for companies because it improves employee performance. I’ve found it helps me to overlook passive aggressiveness at the water cooler; sometimes it’s intentional whereas other times I don’t notice the intended slight until later. Even in the middle of internal turmoil, I was someone anyone could speak to – not because I didn’t pick a side but because everyone saw that I didn’t harbor cross-hostilities. There was too much to accomplish to worry about petty squabbles.
Summary: Faith -> Patience = Wrath Counter
Ira translates to wrath or anger; it’s lethal because it triggers other sins such as deliberately wishing harm on others. Patientia translates to patience, endurance, and forbearance; it calls for us to hold fast to peace in turbulent times. Patientia counters ira because it redirects energy from anger to staying the course. We know we want to stay the course because faith tells us there is a goal at the end of the road, and the goal is worth the effort. Faith is substantiated by evidence and “by no means a blind impulse of the mind.“
Preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season, convince, rebuke, and exhort, be unfailing in patience and in teaching.
– 2 Timothy 4:2
Song of the Day: It Is Well
There are many renditions of this song; one of my favorites is Bethel Music’s version which medleys it with You Make Me Brave.
