I’m a patient woman. I can wait in the self-checkout line at least 26 seconds before I start deep-sighing and foot-tapping. I’ve also built up to exactly three seconds before I blast my horn at a still-stopped car when the light turns green. I can’t speak globally, but I know my country is full of people like me, who have an acquired taste for the instantaneous: swift service, quick text replies, immediate resolutions.
Many of us impose this immediacy mindset on our spiritual growth in suffering. We want to isolate the problem and execute a resolution. Painful experiences like gender identity struggles, marriage crises, or chronic illness defy watertight categories and quick answers. We can easily become confused, weary, and disheartened.
If our pain is supposed to produce endurance (Romans 5:3-5; James 1:2-4)—why isn’t it happening faster? Why doesn’t God give us answers? What words of hope does Christ offer the weary and waiting?
Cultivate and wait
If you grow flowers, you know that beautiful things don’t bloom overnight. A garden bursting with tulips and dahlias is the result of thousands of hours of buried bulbs and unseen cultivation. Before the blossoms, there was only dirt (and sweaty tilling,
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