What do time and patience have to do with each other?
It depends if you’re focusing on time or on patience.
Time doesn’t care about patience.
Patience, however, is only knowable because of time.
What is time?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives us a defintion (or three):
- A nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future.
- An appointed, fixed, or customary moment or hour for something to happen, begin, or end
- The point or period when something occurs.
Wikipedia helpfully tells us, “Time in physics is operationally defined as “what a clock reads.”
God created time for the good of men and women. It puts order into our days, seasons, and lives.
Genesis 1 tells us when God created time: on day four:
Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
Genesis 1:16-18 (NKJV)
He gave us night, He gave us day: we had time.
Prior to that?
He was busy organizing the universe for it–and for us.
God had to set out the galaxies, the suns, the planets.
Only when they were in their proper places could planet Earth be a safe place–with a regular schedule, or time–for humans–in a “just right” universe.
How are time and patience related?
If we had no sense of time passing, would we know patience?
Back at the dictionary, we’re told patience is a synonym for patient. (Patience is the noun, patient the adjective)
Patient means:
- bearing pains or trials calmly or without complaint.
- manifesting forbearance under provocation or strain.
- not hasty or impetuous.
Do you see how time plays a role in these definitions?
Someone wants to do something.
It doesn’t happen immediately.
They have to be patient.
It’s only after time passes (and other events occur), that whatever they desire to do can occur.
And when it takes too long, their time and patience are tried.
What prompted all this?
Living in the United States, I inhabit an era in which time presses and we’re impatient.
We want what we want now, without waiting.
But I worship a God who sees time differently.
If He could take 13.8 billion years to create the universe I inhabit, who am I to complain if I have wait at a traffic light?
But, the idea came this morning from Genesis 19 about Lot and his daughters following the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
After a time, they gathered supplies and headed to the hills to live–just as the angels originally directed them to do.
But the elder daughter looked around and told her sister:
“Our father is old, and there is no man on the earth to come in to us as is the custom of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve the lineage of our father.”
Genesis 19:31-32 NKJV
That would not have been my first reaction had I survived such a cataclysmic event.
But the elder daughter had lost time and patience–and didn’t understand the situation.
In her fear (and ignorance), she made a sinful decision–and then acted on it.
The Lutheran Study Bible noted: “Weak Christians often resort to an ‘end justifies the means’ solution when they feel they must take matters into their own hands, disregarding God’s clear will.”
If they had waited, they would have discovered God only destroyed their area, not the whole world.
Uncle Abraham, In fact, wandered by not long after.
How to recognize–and properly use–time and patience.
God speaks to us constantly–but waiting to recognize His voice can be the challenge.
He never asks us to do something He has not already set in motion. (See the creation of the universe, above).
Often, our requirement is to be patient as He arranges the universe for what He called us to do–at a specific and given time.
As Corrie ten Boom’s story so well describes, waiting often is what we need to do–not take action.
“Father sat down on the edge of the narrow bed. “Corrie,” he began gently, “when you and I go to Amsterdam-when do I give you your ticket?”
The Hiding Place
I sniffed a few times, considering this.
“Why, just before we get on the train.”
“Exactly. And our wise Father in heaven knows when we’re going to need things, too. Don’t run out ahead of Him, Corrie. When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need-just in time.”
Let’s take our time and be patient.
In this day and age in my country, that’s counter-cultural.
But it demonstrates trust in our Creator.
Thanks be to God
(Interesting thoughts about God and time appeared on Breakpoint, February 29, 2024. You can read it here.)
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