A PATIENT BELIEVER

If someone were to ask me, I think I would have to say that I am, by nature, a patient person. Yes, I do get impatient with those I believe are trying to test me by delaying what I know they could and should be doing at the moment. And I have little patience for those who are simply too lazy to do what needs to be done. If I think about it longer, I suspect I can come up with other reasons why I sometimes become impatient.

The fact is that there are some things we cannot hurry; and if we try to hurry what we should not, we will end up with a mess. If the recipe tells us to bake the cake for forty minutes, it means forty minutes. Taking it out of the oven in thrifty-five minutes because we are in a hurry will only leave us with a partially baked cake. If we try to serve that cake and if the diners say anything, it will not be complimentary.

And, of course, as the song says, we can’t hurry love. Love takes time to develop. Yes, we may think that we have fallen in love at first sight; but what we have really done is fall in like at first sight. We like what we see and perhaps hope that our like for the other will be returned and that both likes will turn into love. But that turning-into will take time. It always does as, perhaps, we have learned from painful experience.

Just as we must be patient in finding someone to love, so must we be patient when it comes to our faith. One of my spiritual mentors, Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, says that we must be patient believers. Isn’t it true that we so often want God to answer our prayers immediately because we do believe God can do anything; and because God can do anything, God should do in now? And when God delays in answering our prayers, we become impatient with God.

And yet, we innately know that to be a person of faith we must have patience. How often have we said to another or another said to us when things were not going well for us, “Have faith!”? What was being said was, “Be patient. Be patient with God. This will be resolved in time but not immediately, resolved in God’s own good time. Be a patient believer.”

If God were to respond to our demands as quickly as we respond to those demands that our baptismal faith puts on us, we may be in for a long wait at times. It is a reminder, though, that God probably does lose patience with us. That is not to say that God delays responding to our requests simply to get even. God does not.

It is easy for those of us who believe at times to become impatient with our God. That is simply human nature. There are other times, perhaps more times than we would like to admit, that the demands we place on God are really demands that we should place on ourselves. When we begin to become impatient with God because God is not responding to our prayers/demands, perhaps what we should do is question ourselves if what we are asking of God is not something we should be taking care of on our own, God giving us the grace and strength to accomplish whatever it is we deem needs to be done. Faith demands patience: us with God and, I suspect, God with us, patient believers that we are.