Patience is notorious for being a difficult virtue to master. It is said that what is needed to attain patience is the opportunity to practice patience. However these opportunities for patience are also opportunities for impatience. If, as an impatient person, I find myself in a situation that requires me to wait longer than I desire then it is likely that I will become impatient and thus further the habit of impatience. The opportunity for patience only further entrenched my impatience. This becomes all the more challenging when I truly want to be patient. My impatience will be experienced with even greater anxiety and guilt. I become impatient with my impatience, which only moves me further from the goal of patience.

The other day I was driving down the interstate when I moved into the left lane to pass a vehicle. But as soon as I got into the left lane this vehicle sped up so that our two vehicles were side by side. Another vehicle comes up behind me and now I am the one clogging up the passing lane. I speed up. So, it seems, does the driver in the right lane beside me. Finally, in annoyance I hit the accelerator, rev the engine up (almost hoping my opponent hears the sound of frustration), pass the vehicle in question and move back into the right lane to relieve the flow of traffic. Of course, not a minute later the vehicle that I had just passed moved into the left lane to pass me back. I take it to my credit that I did not flip this driver off.

Here I was enjoying a nice drive down the highway and before I knew it had happened I found myself impatient. My mood was soured. And for what? Why did I find it so important to pass this vehicle? Would it have taken me more than two minutes of my life to remain behind them and go a mile per hour or two slower than I would have liked?

The impatient person suffers for their impatience. The Spirit does not desire us to become patient because it is difficult or because the Spirit likes to come up with challenging rules and dispositions. The Spirit of God loves us and does not like to see us suffer needlessly with impatience.

We live in an age that is at war with patience. Fast food drive throughs, Amazon Prime two-day shipping, self-checkout stands, high speed internet. We are taught that we have the right to have anything we want as quickly as we want it. Time is money, we are told, and we assume every minute must be spent wisely. We assume the wise spending of this currency of time entails productivity. To spend a minute longer in traffic, to spend an hour sitting and doing nothing is considered a waste of an opportunity. No wonder patience is so difficult to master.

As an impatient person I have little advice on how to become patient. I could spend much more time complaining about all the factors outside of our control that make patience difficult than I can spend teaching myself or others how to be patient. Perhaps the only productive thing I can say on the matter is that, as a fruit of the Spirit, patience is not something to be mastered but to be received. It is the Spirit who grows the fruit of patience in our lives.

Perhaps the first step to receiving the gift of patience is to recognize it as a gift. At the very least this alleviates the pressure we put on ourselves to acquire patience. When patience becomes a gift I can at the very least free myself from my impatience with my impatience. When I become impatient I can simply acknowledge that the fruit of patience is still in the seed-mode. It is buried deep inside me and it is not yet ready for harvest. While I may be impatient for this patience to grow into something more productive, at least I am impatient with the Spirit and not myself. I believe the Spirit can handle my impatience better than I can. When I hold on to my own impatience, all that happens is that this impatience grows and festers. But the Spirit can receive my impatience and give it back to me as a gift and blessing (maybe even as patience).

I am still stuck on this first step of acquiring patience. But if I had to guess what the next step might be, I would guess it would have something to do with coming to a better understanding of time. The world tells us that time is money, and that for the currency of time to be spent wisely then it must be “productive”. But the Spirit says that time is a gift. It is not something earned. It is not something to be hoarded or treated as scarce. Time is a gift. And like all gifts, it is to be enjoyed. Of course, gifts can be wasted. We can throw them away. But if we find peace and joy and life in a gift, then it is not wasted. Thus, the only way to waste time is to not receive it as a gift. An extra couple minutes in traffic is an extra couple minutes to sit and be. A delay is an opportunity to rest, or an opportunity to pray, or an opportunity to read, or an opportunity to call a friend, or an opportunity to practice the freedom of doing nothing. Even the delays in life are gifts. We are not losing time for time cannot be lost. We are receiving time from the Spirit.

Again, I am still early on this journey and I know little about what is next. But I continue to trust the Spirit to grow the fickle fruit of patience.