This podcast serves as a devotional on one of the key challenges to every leader – exercising patience in an impatient world. Whether the issue is discernment or the timing on when to have a difficult conversation, learning to wait patiently is one of the greatest gifts we can give those around us.
I share briefly from Alan Kreider’s The Patient Ferment of the Early Church
where he notes that one of the primary reasons the church grew in her first 300 years was because of her commitment to patience. He argues they created a comprehensive “culture of patience,” with the early church fathers writing more about the Christian virtue of patience than about evangelism. People looking on from the outside were attracted to this non-anxious lifestyle of the early Christians. As a result, the church blossomed evangelistically.
Quoting the early church father Tertullian (3rd century), he writes: God’s mission is unhurried and unstoppable. “Patience is the very nature of God.” It has rightly been said that the fall of Adam and Eve was marked by human impatience; it was “the original sin in the eyes of the Lord” (Quotations are from Tertullian’s, Letter on Patience http://www.pseudepigrapha.com/LostBooks/tertullian_patience.htm).
I close the podcast with a short meditation exercise around Psalm 37:7: Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him. Let me know at info@emotionallyhealthy.org if you find it helpful.
Enjoy!
Pete
