Cultivating Patience in the Midst of Productivity - Life on the Vine Pt. 5 at BillyCalderwood.com

Another translation for patience is “long suffering” (Contrast with “short temper”) and is rooted in the character of God who is “slow to anger and abounding in love.” This carries with the notion of being willing to yield control (God allows creation to go its own way, is not in a hurry, is non-coercive but waits patiently for us to respond to his initiative to reach out to us). Throughout the Scriptures, Christians are admonished to participate in this other-directed patience or long suffering of God. “God forgives with the expectation that we will do likewise… …God has broken the cycle of vengeance and expects us to do the same.”

Obstacles to cultivating a life of patience are found in the dominant cultures’ segmenting and regulating of time. In times past and other cultures “precision and uniformity have not always been the most critical issues when measuring time” but with the advent of the mechanical clock, time became “a resource, something to be segmented scheduled and managed.” In spite of some obvious advantages, the clock has become our master. With this come the problems of hoarding time (”time is money” this commodification of time causes us to see time not as a gift but as a resource to be spent, and, “can we really expect to be patient with people as long as we believe that our time is our own?”) exalting productivity, (if time is a scarce commodity, the question “What do you have to show for your time?” creates a great deal of anxiety in us) and going faster (we feel a tremendous pressure to “accomplish things” as quickly as possible resulting in a frenetic pace that causes the other to be an undesirable irritant). Kenneson suggests that cultivating patience will require remembering our story (we are in the story of a slow patient God not an in-a-hurry-God) reckoning time differently (the future belongs to God and Christians are called to a view of time informed by God’s ultimate purpose for creation and to “offer the world in the present a foretaste of the ultimate glory that God is bringing definitively in the future.” Thus, Christians are freed to view time as a gift and dwell graciously in the present) and embodying a different rhythm (the church “is in an age of waiting between Christ’s initial and final advent” therefore, “central to our story is the activity of waiting.” Observing the church calendar and practicing the Sabbath are suggested as ways to incorporate this rhythm.