From the Pulpit: Learning the virtue of patience

Patience is eternal, and like all eternal virtues it is challenging to live out. When we are running late, or we’re stuck in traffic, or we just want what we want when we want it, our willingness to wait is our ability to step into the realm of spirit or not. The most fundamental measure tying us to earthly things is time and space. Time, and our attachment to it, takes us away from beauty. It focuses our ideas, thoughts, and emotions on the limited, the finite, and the scarce. In thinking about time, our attention is drawn toward not having enough which, when played out to its ultimate conclusion, leads us into a living hell of scarcity.

The great basketball coach John Wooden would counsel his players, "Move quickly, but don't hurry." What Wooden understood is the most powerful thing an athlete can do is be precisely where she is when she is there. It is the patience to not take the shot until the shot is lined up, the patience to not move with the ball until one has caught the ball, the patience to be precisely where we are in the game when we are in the game that actually opens us to the wider spheres of existence and greatness. Nowhere in the Gospel accounts does Jesus lose his patience and hurry.

We have lots of reasons not to embrace patience: fear, desire, anger they all entice us not to stay in the moment but get out of the discomfort of the now. Yet, when we are patient enough to be in the moment we can open to our perception and experience of the moment no matter how gnarly. On every level, with everything, we can be patient and present; choosing how we will perceive, choosing how we will experience, and in those choices actually step closer to the heavenly things of life. Viktor Frankl survived the concentration camps of World War II in Germany, and in observing his suffering and the suffering of others he suggested, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Patience is simply understanding there are higher, more important, more heavenly things than time and space. Time is far less important than the perception or the experience with which we choose to fill it. Our moments are our vessels to fill; they are not the love or joy or life which we strive for them to contain. It is in enslaving ourselves to the illusion of time as something more than just the vessel which the experience of life pours into that we miss the wonders that God places in each moment. It is as if we have a ticket on the most scenic and beautiful ride in creation then spend the journey staring at our watch and wondering when we will arrive.

This Saturday, as you thumb through your paper or as you scroll on your phone or computer, I invite you to live out the challenge of patience in your life. God's only desire is to bring more joy into every life in every moment. When we place our attention away from what is and into what is not we foil the very promise that the Creator has in store for each of us. Putting our focus on the time we feel we do or do not have only robs us of the joyful experience of heaven that is laden in every minute. My hope is that you will let each moment be a vessel of the promise and blessing God has in store for each second of your life; be patient.

The Rev. Andy Stinson is senior minister at First Congregational Church of Fall River.