take the time cause the lights are shining bright

Ten minutes before his youngest daughter Amy walked down the aisle, Terry engaged me with a passing comment about marriage. He said, “I have a feeling I will cry the hardest at yours and Mark’s (his lone single child) weddings because you’ve been so patient.” I found the statement bizarre, not in the timing of the conversation, but because I feel anything but patient. My heart is full of burning desire: for companionship, for comfort, for a ministry partner, and for one to share the beautiful intimacy of sex. Growing up in the church, I have been instructed that wanting these things without a relationship “just happening” demonstrates a lack of patience and a discontent with God. After all, a man can only discover true love when he’s not looking! Right?

[We should always investigate the source of Christian cliché.]

This inspired a mental wikipedia jog about patience. I readily identify the other “fruit” mentioned in Galatians 5:22-23 as the Spirit manifests Himself in me. I did not learn love, joy, and peace. Not by trying harder did I attain an attitude of kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, or self-control. Outside of His work in my life, there would be no transformation.

If patience is also a product of the Spirit as opposed to a trained work of the flesh, why do I condemn myself while the Spirit is present? Why do many believers chastise themselves for lacking this seemingly elusive characteristic? Who deemed a pleading for patience the most dangerous prayer?

What if that word doesn’t mean what we think it means?

That word (MAKROTHYMIA in the Greek) is found fourteen times in the New Testament, along with another ten in its verb or predicate nominative form. Of these twenty-four occurrences:

• Nine deal with God offering grace when He has every right to crush us.
• Four instruct us to offer the same grace and kindness to others.
• Five encourage us to persevere hardship.
• Three ask us to await the coming of the Lord.

Clearly, none of these condemn my desires. The aforementioned passage about “fruit” makes twenty-two. I‘d like to focus on the two that remain:

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things…” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7)

For when God made the promise to Abraham, since He could swear by no one greater, He swore by Himself, saying, “I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply you.” And so, having patiently waited, he obtained the promise. (Hebrews 6:13-15)

Paul’s definition of selfless love describes patience for the benefit of the beloved. If we purely love others through the overflow of Christ’s love, we will submit a selfless grace upon their lives that does not expect a reward. And while this practice of patience might stretch my flesh to the furthest limits of my comfort zone, even now I can humbly come before the Father with a clear conscience. Given the opportunity to receive a selfish prize by taking what was available, I have repeatedly considered the needs of others ahead of my wants… particularly the needs of women, which is germane to my questionably “impatient” desires.

As for the second passage… WHAT?!?!?!?!?

The writer recognizes the same Abraham that accepted his wife’s suggestion to expedite God’s promise by sleeping with her servant, initiating millenniums of strife between that offspring and His people. Patiently waiting? Are you serious?

Perhaps God’s expectation for us is less about suppressing unmet desires and more about enduring the trials within His truth. In this regard, my faith has been unshakable and my perseverance has only blossomed the intimacy between myself and my Creator. Despite my spiritual diligence in singlehood, I will never be the guy that stops seeking. I’ll never excuse my inactive sexuality as a frustrating nuisance to be extinguished. I will continue to desire a wife, a child, and the blessings that such a life would offer.

I’ve finally come to realize that this doesn’t make me impatient.