Patience ...

Friday, Aug 24, 2012. How much patience do you need for healing? Often, patience is really needed. You need to rest. You need time. You need to recover, and you cannot go on with your normal activities.

Patience good or bad? …

Can there be too much patience? I have been very patiently waiting for progress in some projects … I was convinced that everyone knows that we need to make progress. I thought it is clear and many different people are working on it, with some bottle necks, but they will be overcome. But it seems that my patience was not that good, I should have had less patience and more control over what happened. Things did not make the progress which I wanted …

For healing, patience seems to be extremely important. When you want to loose weight, when you are overweight, you need patience. But of course, you also need to act appropriately. When you just wait, you will never get into a better range of weight. You need to exercise. You need to change your diet. You need to balance input and activity level. That might not work right away - recently I wanted to loose some kilos, but even though I acted, it first went into the wrong direction … So patience and endurance are very important to succeed, to heal, to get better and get well.

Patience is highly valued in the bible, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament. We are asked to exercise patience. What is so crucial and important about patience? Why is it such a prominent feature, which is mentioned again and again?

The Patience of the Lord …

The Lord himself is said to be of strong patience. He can wait. He is slow to anger. He is willing to look into long-term developments.

Without the patience of the Lord, the world would be destroyed. Without his patience, we would no longer live. He is patient with our ignorant life, with our short-sighted decisions and activities. He is patient with our relationships. He is patient with our heart, which is not based on truth, but on illusion and delusion. We believe to be something, where we are nothing … and we judge the Lord from our twisted viewpoints. Instead of truth, love, patience, help, friendliness, we exercise hate, ignorance, greed, preoccupation, power and boasting. We can be happy that he is so patient, since he could come with his anger and destroy us and our environment - and it would even be a just thing, where we get what we deserve.

In his patience, in his love and justice, God has opened a door, which leads to life. The door is Jesus, the one who died at the cross. The door is Jesus, the one who did not do what we do … and who can save us from the consequences, which we deserve, who can transform us into something, where we start to live in truth, in justice, in friendliness and love. There is much power in the name of Jesus, the patient one, still waiting for us today and tomorrow! (Roland Potthast) ... more texts