But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. | Galatians 5:22–23
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience. | Julius Caesar
The book of Job is tough. We are three weeks into a 12-week study through this poem on suffering, pain, and evil. I knew getting into it that I would be challenged. With everything going on in the world around us and the universal desire to avoid difficulties, I knew that staring into the darkness would stir up some areas of weakness. I will be honest:
I didn’t think it would be patience.
With all of the major issues that the Book of Job confronts, it is patience that has hit me the hardest.
Every week when I prepare the sermon, I sit in the text. I read commentaries, I read the larger context, but I spend the majority of my time making sure that I am being true to the purpose of the specific section that we are in. The book of Job makes this really hard: it is an invitation to us to sit in the ashes with Job. Week after week, we are presented with new questions and challenges to God, but what we are not given is … relief. As we sit with Job and his friends, we are forced to wait for an answer. I find myself wanting to jump forward, to break the tension with a solution, but this isn’t what God does. Instead, He invites us into the drawn-out struggle. The difficulty of this life is not that God doesn’t have a plan or isn’t in control, but that we lack these things. We are forced to trust and be patient.
Many of the feelings that I have had working through the book of Job parallel the feelings I have about the current situation in the world. What makes the COVID-19 struggle so difficult are the unknowns. We have an invisible enemy that has altered the way that we function as a society. We want to fight back and fix it, but we can’t. There isn’t a pill or a quick process. There isn’t a person we can replace to make it better (though many are looking for a scapegoat). Instead, we are being forced to strengthen the one muscle we have no desire to exercise: patience. This blog post isn’t an attempt to stir up a debate between those who believe that we should stay at home or other who think it is time to re-open; no matter where you stand socially or politically, the issue of patience is being stressed for all of us.
Job gives us guidance in this. One of the things that Job teaches us is that difficulty is not something to be solved, but the way that God reveals His wisdom to us. Patience, then, is not an end in itself, but a means to knowledge. I have often said that time is the great revealer of truth. Patience allows us to reap this wisdom by not jumping to answers before they are made clear. Patience protects us from making mistakes and causing damage in attempt to solve things too quickly.
In this time of uncomfortable waiting, we must be patient. May God protect us from striving so hard for relief that we put our hope in false solutions. May God grant us patience to learn about ourselves through this. More than anything, may our dependence on God and His sovereignty be strengthened when we are overwhelmed and desperate for relief. Patience is not just a virtue that you should practice; patience is a gift to the Christian. We can be patient because we know that God is in control and is working ALL together toward a good and complete end.
When the frustrations hit you and the walls feel like they are closing in, and as this pandemic stretches on and feels more and more burdensome, take it to God. Not simply to get an answer, but to gain the strength to be patient in suffering.