Patience
I want to write about patience, about how I read a devotional this morning that talked about God shaping us like Ore, and how we have to be patient while we are being shaped, formed, worked, because in the end, we will become exactly what God intended us to be.
But I can’t. I don’t know how to write about being patient. Moreover, I don’t know how to pray for patience — it seems…it doesn’t make sense to me I guess. Pray for patience, wait for patience, be patient about having patience?
Oswald Chambers said that when God gives people visions, not in some mystical way, but just a vision of what you could be doing in the future, he then puts you through a process of getting you ready for that vision. “Whirls you about on his potter’s wheel” until we are molded and formed to the exact shape we need to be in order to live out that vision. Vision can be substituted here with a lot of words I suppose: calling, passion, blah…
I guess I can’t write about being patient because I don’t want to be patient. Because when I read that pithy little devotional this morning, it spoke directly to my soul. I had a vision, heck I have many visions, I just had a dream last night that a friend in high school was riding in my car and jumped out the sun roof (which I don’t have) on the free way and almost died — but I had a vision when I came out here, and I had a vision when I sat in Brent’s house almost two years ago after coming back from New Orleans and we talked till five in the morning about our visions; and I had more visions when me and Sam sat on the park bench in Santa Barbara and watched the fog roll in off the water and I told him I had to leave, and that I was leaving in three days, and I did. And in thirty days I went back.
Patience.
Last night I told Brent to pray for patience. Sometimes I think I know exactly where God is going to have me in the future, and what I will be doing, what we will be doing, and I hate being stuck here in this valley with the glorious mountains behind and in front of me, the mountains in front seem so far away, painfully distant, but if Oswald is right and those visions are not just fanciful dreams, but things that can actually become truth, I know what sits on the other side of the rocky peaks, and I can’t wait to feel the sun on my face on the other side…
So I can’t write about patience.
I can only pray for it.
kevinthomas
Thanks for being faithful in your writing. That thought came at a perfect time for us.
Samuel
I see you sitting silently, staring at a computer screen. No one has a clue, but as you sit there, your vivid life, your raw spirit, and your smoldering passions are spreading like an ink spill across the screen; across the country, into a computer lab in a seminary. There I sit, trying to get my mind off “hurch polity”after a strange theology session, reading about patience…thinking for the first time in my life the thoughts you’ve shown me to think: what sense does it make to wait for patience? And after you pray for it and get it, what does that mean? Can people who don’t expect anything be patient, or are they just numb? I read your words of patience, and I see your expectancy, and it reminds me of all I’ve always believed about you. As they say, “good things.”
mike