Day 4110 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 1:8 NIV

What is patience?

Is it perhaps painful as proven in the past in which we’d waited for things to come that maybe never did? Is it quite heavy in the present as still we wait for what we hope are days better than these we’re in? Is it something of a stranger which always seems a danger as it’s designed inside a mind willing to risk settling for whatever is for whatever isn’t yet? Is it a curiosity that can’t stop considering the gravity of the reality that yet isn’t? Is it a matter of reality that, though we all really don’t enjoy, is perhaps there to help us learn better what enjoyment is so that we can experience it more fully whenever we get wherever it waits?

Is it something that only we have to endure or maybe something that others endure on our part too?

Is it true that it’s hard, scary, oftentimes somewhat deflating?

Yes, but I suggest that this may be patience’s biggest benefit as, well, in truth we need that more than we could ever know inside what is this hole in which all we all seem to know is only hurry. For we’ve come upon this way of life, either willfully or at least willingly, in which we spend our days lost inside this craze that’s become this maze of things made and that by man and that for man because it seems as though all of man has always known that all of man seeks to hold whatever they can as fast as they can as it seems we all easily understand that hope is heavier than we imagined.

Indeed, hope is one of the most beautiful things anyone can ever experience, but it’s also one of the most burdensome experiences that anyone can ever have.

And why is that?

Because nobody hopes for what they have. We talk all the time about this glaring discrepancy in life as is seen inside every single scene being seen and shown inside what is a society that’s so clearly grown so impatient that we’re all now but patients of hatred and harm and all because we’ve embraced this now general alarm that has us all on edge trying to find inside this life all those things that we think we’d like whilst also hoping always mostly to avoid the many we’re sure we wouldn’t.

And mix with that that fact that says that none of us know what we’re doing, as is proven by the vast majority of what the vast majority are doing, and well what you’ll quickly realize is that it’s always been our eyes who’ve all but insisted upon leading the way and that to what remains what our hearts expect to be as good as it gets but also what our minds happen to almost always find needs to be found as soon as possible so that we need endure patience as little as needed.

Why?

Because we seem to have somewhere managed to equate having to be patient with all but having to die.

We are indeed such a hurried horde that we can’t seem to bear the weight of having to wait. It’s like that little girl in Willy Wonka, we want it now. What is it that we want now? To be honest, we oftentimes don’t really know and pretty much always really don’t care. We’ve just become a people who breathe this air of desire that continues to stoke this fire that’s burning our lives to the ground, something we seem to almost enjoy if not actually appreciate as it helps us get closer to where it is that we assume our life’s best is waiting to be found:

On this ground.

Or in this ground. Or in coffee grounds, or camp grounds, or fair grounds, or owning a piece of ground upon which our kids can grow, or maybe even coming to know the lay of the ground so that we can, perhaps only eventually, have proven we have found what is a fountain of youth or some hidden cave that’s home to so much treasure that we can afford so much prize and pleasure that we fail to know how to contain our excitement.

Indeed, we think that life is all about excitement, enjoyment, pleasure and prosperity. And, well, all of those things are now those things that we simply cannot wait for anymore. Rather, again, we want them now. This very instant. As soon as possible if not sooner. We want everything we hope to have yesterday. It should be here by now. We should be there by now.

Yes! Are we there yet?

Where you ask?

Again, we don’t have any stinking idea but we know it’s going to prove so amazing once we’re there that we’ll forget the arduous painfulness of the plain and strain we endured along the way.

Which, oddly enough, is kind of the point of faith as it exists as this immovable hope that’s placed, as if treasure, inside what is a home in which everything is finally right. And indeed, such a promise is what Christ has promised unto those who’ve been here left behind, for now, so that He might go on ahead and prepare a place for us in that place still before us in which there’s to be found nothing that’s made this life so hard and heavy as it’s always seemed.

Even patience.

Indeed, once we get to Heaven, provided that’s where we’ve done all we could to end up, chiefly believing in all of Christ’s doing, then we’ll never again know what it is to want, to worry, to wade inside of having to wait for what are those things that we’d known to want and learned to crave.

Rather once home we’ll exist forever alongside every single point, purpose, promise and plan that He’d always had for our lives.

And it’s said to be so amazing up there that, once there, want itself will be forgotten as all things will be as they should have always been: Just us and Him who is our Father who has always, for we sons and daughters, done all He could to see to it that our lives were good and we were fed and we were safe and we were sure that He’d arrive us to that place in which He is, and, since He is, so too then everything we could ever need or even possibly imagine to have.

Problem is then not found within the promise but rather the patience.

In fact, it’s the demand of patience that’s designed us patients of impatience proven inside this delusion of our determining to have so much here that we neither need nor then should so hope to keep as so many of us so often do. But yet we do. We’ve sadly opted for this alternate approach to living a life in which all life is now only about what all we have, our every hope given almost always to only our having more.

Why?

Because it’s just easier. It’s quicker. In many ways it is in fact verifiably safer. And that’s because, well, there’s very little risk that we can be wrong. Not necessarily in regard to the worth of something or thus the importance thereof as, well, we’re all wrong about things like that all the time. But rather it seems as if we’ve all come to understand that we can’t be wrong in regard to the things we know we can have and thus have come to assume we need.

For after all, if it’s something we can see then we feel this certainty that we can find it. And if we can find it then we’re sure we can have it once we do. And if we can have it once we’ve found it then we’re arguably quite justified in our seeking to find it so that we can have it. And as we feel ever-justified in all of our trying to find all that we’re trying to have within this life, then, again, we aren’t likely to be proven wrong in having it, in wanting it, in winning it.

Because, once we do, we know we’ll be able to hold it high for all to see, something we’ve too made of even greater ease thanks to the advent of such nonsense as social media having become nothing more than some personal bulletin board upon which we post pictures about all the prizes we’ve won and the vacations we’ve taken and, most of all, the blasted opinions that we just can’t manage to ever realize may be best to keep both to ourselves and thus under wraps.

No, we’ll conceal nothing as, well, our lives are just going so amazing that we simply have to let everyone know how awesome we must be to have received all these amazing outcomes and achieved all these praise-worthy victories.

Indeed, we ourselves are awesome it seems.

At what?

Well, I guess anything we need to think we are. Which anymore seems to be just about everything that asks basically nothing of patience. In fact it seems that kids these days have outgrown the process of learning as many are now graduating without the ability to read or tell time or use their own minds to do their own homework. Literally saw a clip of a girl just last night who had opted for a life in which she was using ai to help her pass an exam in what seemed to be, due to apparent age and things, a college setting.

And by “using ai” I mean that she was asking some computer system every question and just writing down the answer given.

Another was in the middle of a literal job interview being done virtually and they too were using ai to help them answer the interviewer’s questions by letting ai listen to the conversation and then just reading the response that this actual idiocy gave them.

We’ve let impatience win so much of our lives that we now are losing our minds as we all seem to find that it’s just easier, quicker and apparently more productive thus to just let computers live and think and write and read for us.

All because we’ve not the time to waste upon the doing of such things as rather we all seem to agree that our time is always to be better spent upon our seeking still for those things that please and pacify and otherwise prove perfectly to persistently placate our now passive interest in our even being here in what remains a place that, even though filled with all this stuff that we want, still dares to ask that we sometimes wait to have some of it.

It’s just rude at this point!

For again, we know what we want and, more obviously, that we want it now. Because, well, time’s running out and we feel as if we deserve to enjoy the many delights and delicacies we’ve ourselves decided and determined are apparently needed if ever we’re to actually enjoy this life to the best of what reality says are our rapidly shrinking abilities.

Again, kids can’t even read anymore.

Yeah, not really sure what to say, but that it probably shouldn’t be this way and nor then should so many be seemingly so content that it is.

At least it does seem to be helping with impatience though!

And this I know because I know of folks who aren’t agreeing to wait for many things anymore. Again, all this ai stuff is allowing some of us, me by no means included as I’ll never surrender by life to some computer system, but it’s allowing some out there to create artificial friends and even virtual romantic partners with whom they’re forming real bonds, at least from their side of the screen. Others are a little more analog than that in that they’re still focused more upon their having of material possessions that they can sit on a shelf or hang on their wall and bask therefrom in the glory of it all and the fact that they’ve gained it.

Still others are focused on the plans they make for the trips they take to get away from what is a life that, if they were to be honest, they kind of seem to sort of hate seeing as how they’re willing to spend so much to go somewhere else and do nothing of what they normally have to. Trips they can’t wait to take as they feel their minds and hearts begin to break a little more every day inside their living of what is that life that they can’t admit that they hate.

Others are going way old-school and worshiping literal golden statues of some old fool who knows better to lie than to lead, a fact many refuse to see because to see it would prove that they were wrong in having supported his deceptions, albeit unknowingly, and are thus at least partly to blame for all the things that are spiraling only downward at the moment.

And, well, if there’s anything we all hate worse than having to wait it’s admitting we were wrong.

Yeah, we can wait on that one.

But the question is for how long? And no, I’m not talking in terms of politics or their golden calves carved to look like themselves. Not talking about how much longer we’ll have to keep waiting for our to have found that next item we long to hold as within it we’ve long held our hope. Not even talking about such matters as dating and marriage and the hopefully actual relationship that should be formed, and that between two people, along the way.

No, what I’m trying to say, or in this case ask, is how long can we wait to not admit that we’ve been wrong for all these years that we’ve spent inside this impatience unto life, unto faith, unto hope that we’ve instead decided to just hurry up and make ourselves at home in what is the one place that we’ll all live in the least?

How much longer can we refuse to start looking for what isn’t here and thus that place that we aren’t? How much longer can we refuse to start hoping toward those outcomes that we can’t find here, those hopes that won’t fit here? How much longer can we refuse to lose this literally God-forsaking approach to life in which we live as if all that matters is all that fits inside our homes, inside our garages, inside our mirages of matters that only feign and fake importance, something we willingly allow them to do simply because we cannot stand to lose what is this time within this life in which we can so easily find and, because of that, find we want what remains so many things that are found faster and easier and thus vastly more simply?

How much longer can we trade away eternity for what’s always been the devil’s very best offer:

All the provision, protection and power a pride could ever hope to have in life.

And yes, all the bread too, and true, we all love bread.

And so, yes, that offer still sounds amazing and it’s honestly one that so many around us are finding. Many here are in truth enjoying their reward and, again, they’re plastering it all over social media, making it seem that they have truly found the very best of everything here to find. And yeah, that makes it even harder to live a life waiting for something else, looking toward somewhere else, trusting in someone else who asks that we sit tight, stay patient, trust that something better is coming.

All while proving that His path remains here one of suffering and loneliness and loss and losing out on enjoying what it seems almost everyone else gets to enjoy.

But maybe the real confusion isn’t that of patience and its importance but rather one decidedly simpler and thus likely easier to overlook:

The difference between joy and enjoyment.

Something proven in that enjoyment is easy to find, proven in that all of us have in fact found it and that more times than we can count. But when’s the last time you experienced joy? When’s the last time you felt “an inexpressible and glorious joy”? When’s the last time you held hope so high in life that you refused to let it down unto anything in this life? When’s the last time you met with a love that was let down into this life so as to save those still vastly lost living one in which they think that having things quickly is the very epitome of a life’s purpose and prize?

Yes, when is the last time that you spent any time with Jesus, the Bible, in prayer to God up there just thanking Him for all He’s doing, most of which is often only helping us start losing all the things we never needed in life, mostly our plans for more that we want and yet still don’t need?

Probably been a while because, well, we’re all so busy here inside this hurry trying to have and hold all we’ve hoped to have. We’re all lost inside this race spent only through this place for what remains but prizes here too. We’ve lost so much life to this idea that life was supposed to please and placate a human pride, which itself only adds to our impatience as, well, we kind of need to hurry up and have all we’ve always hoped to so that we can show it off to the world who continues to look to only those things that others have as the very outermost reaches of all they themselves then begin to reach for.

In short, we’re again trading away our eternity and all the joy promised therein for what is the enjoyment of all things temporary and prone to tarnishing.

Now that’s not to say that there’s no joy or reason or purpose or even hope to be found inside things that do fit inside this life lived inside this world. But friends, shouldn’t we all want something that doesn’t fade so fast? Isn’t it worth waiting for a hope, a joy, a peace that lasts?

Indeed, what all are we missing here inside this way of life spent missing the purpose of patience? For it’s never once been about our doing without. Calling us to store up for ourselves treasures in Heaven and to abstain the leaven of the Pharisees isn’t asked of us because He wants to see us suffer. It’s because He knows that waiting isn’t the suffering we’ve come to assume it is. And, well, He too knows the suffering that awaits those unwilling to wait for their prize to be found on the other side of this life in this place.

And He doesn’t want that for anyone.

And so instead He asks everyone to be patient. To wait. To trust that He will get us to that place in which nothing is missing, nothing is needed, want is literally nothing we’ll ever again have to know anything of because He has promised that He will provide, will prove to be all we’ve ever needed anyway.

So wait for that day, and as you do, do all you can to allow humility to help you learn what hope and peace and joy truly are along the way. And that done in that, well, yeah, sometimes we learn best what best really is when we don’t have it yet. And, well, looking around at what the world’s becoming, I think it safe to say that best isn’t waiting somewhere here for us to find it. Rather the best has already found us and simply asks that we slow down, embrace the process, appreciate the journey and hopefully learn the purpose of His plans on our way toward His promises.

Will it be easy? No.

Will it be worth it?

You better believe it will.

But, well, truth is that we’ll never know if we don’t believe, so yeah, let us be thankful that He calls us unto a patience that helps us learn to believe, to trust, to have faith and that in Him rather than in us and all that rusts that everyone else is still in a hurry to have.

Have less my friends.

It’ll just make Heaven seem even fuller once there.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold