Patience

 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. (II Peter 3:8-9) 

It’s 6:42 am. I’ve been up for almost 45 minutes, and I haven’t finished my breakfast, haven’t taken the dog for a walk, and I’m just starting to tinker with tomorrow’s blog post. Frustration is already creeping in – and I don’t even have to go to work today, or tomorrow. But I’m bound up in time. A good day is one in which I get all my chores and errands run no later than 2 pm and can spend the rest of the day doing more important things, so I look at the clock a lot, and waste time fussing about how late it is.

And then there’s God. He isn’t bound by time. One way to look at it is that He lives outside of time, and can step into time as He chooses, so He can return to one second in time repeatedly, like an oil painter can return to his portrait, building up layers and making adjustments, adding nuances. And technically, that’s not correct, because he is always everywhere. He can remain in one second of time, while we are forced to move on to the next. He does this while being equally present in every other second but that’s even harder to get our minds around than that He is outside of time.

Something that might be just as hard for us to understand is the idea of God being patient. We see deities depicted as being capricious, impatient, or negligent. We tend to think in terms of either fight or flight, aggression or passivity, domination or withdrawal but God doesn’t generally do that. There are times that He does, but more often, He often seems to do something closer to what a friend says of cats. “No,” she says, “means ‘approach from a different direction.’”

Part of our problem with patience is that it is a matter of control. When we aren’t in control or feel our control threatened, we lose patience. When we don’t know the route we’re traveling, we lose patience because we have no basis on which to base our sense of progress.

But let’s return to the oil painter. The artist looks at the model and applies paint to the canvas that may have nothing to do with what the model looks like to us. The artist keeps working on the painting, sometimes seeming to destroy what has been done. But there is no giving up and there is no hurry, and when the artist is done, it’s a masterpiece.

That is a picture of patience. We aren’t an experiment or series of experiments in which God tries this or that to see what happens and has to go back to the drawing board. He knows the end from the beginning. He knows the steps needed to turn us into masterpieces, so there’s no hurry, there’s no loss of control, not “Oh, My Self!” moments with God.