Endurance Waiting

Photo by Veri Ivanova on Unsplash

So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?" He said to them, "It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority."

-Acts 1:6-7

He has made everything beautiful in its time; also he has put eternity into man’s mind, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

-Ecclesiastes 3:11

This afternoon at Mass, Father began his homily on the need for patience with God by relating his recent frustrations trying to return from his three-day vacation in Colorado. In the end, he and his traveling companions drove seventeen hours to get home in time for him to say his Masses today.

Traveling seventeen hours in a vehicle with three other people does require patience of a kind. The boon patience receives in this scenario is knowing that there will be no need for patience in seventeen hours. Having patience with God is entirely different, because God does not give us any kind of a timeline. With God, we have no idea how long we will have to exercise our patience nor how much patience we'll have to exercise. Take Moses, for example. When Moses killed the abusive Egyptian overseer and fled into exile to become a shepherd for Jethro, Exodus states his age as, "when Moses had grown up" (Exodus 2:11), which Acts claims was forty years old (Acts 7:23). By the time God gets around to sending Moses to confront Pharaoh about releasing the Hebrews, Exodus states, "Now Moses was eighty years old" (Exoduus 7:7). Moses had to wait a full forty years before God allowed him to return to Egypt and free his kinsmen.

"Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed Haran" (Genesis 12: 4). Abram was ninety-nine years old, when God made his covenant with him, changed his name to Abraham and promised him his son, Isaac (Genesis 17:1). Abram waited twenty-four years just to get his name changed and twenty-five to get a son. In the meantime, he had been wandering across the Middle East waiting for God to tell him where to settle. All in all, from the time Abraham was called in Genesis 11 to the time he died in Genesis 25 was 100 years and all he saw of God's promise was Ishmael and Isaac, only two of the innumerable descendants God promised him.

"But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise as some count slowness, but is forbearing toward you" (2 Peter 3:8-9).

God is not in a hurry and this is when Fortitude, one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, comes in handy. We cannot get impatient with God and throw a temper tantrum. I speak from experience. It doesn't work. No matter how many years God takes, we must remain firmly committed to living our faith joyously and genuinely. We cannot stop living as we ought, because we have gotten tired of waiting for God to get around to us.

In fact, God is not waiting to get around to us. He is waiting for us to get around to Him. God takes so long to answer our prayers and to place us where He wants us, because we are not ready yet. Our impatience with God reveals our immaturity as Christians and God is very careful about blessing people before they are ready. Through the sacramental life of the Church and Sacred Scripture, God asks us to take the time we are spending waiting on Him to unite our wills with His and to begin to love Him more than we love ourselves.

Patience with God may seem more like trying to run the 100 mile length of Death Valley than anything else. The trip is arduous, seemingly unending, and you may die before you get to the end of it. We can't be so negative about it, though. As difficult as it is and as long as it has been going on, we must remember, that God's love is sustaining us and purifying us through this trial. God's love sustained Abraham and Moses. God's love will sustain us. Like Abraham and Moses, God has something in store for us, like preparing us for Heaven with Him. We just have to be patient.