You'll Have To Be Patient

or The 4 Layers of Patience (and the two we ignore)

I’ve come to realize that there are at least four layers to patience.

The first layer is ordinary patience.

Waiting in line or in traffic. Waiting for the Amazon package to come tomorrow or the next day (or the Christmas Eve feeling of 10 stops away).

Some of these circumstances aren’t so much mundane as they are circumstantial. Waiting to graduate college, or get married. Waiting for your child to be born, waiting for the year-end bonus, etc etc. This kind of patience is anticipatory. It’s waiting for something to happen. Whether that’s waiting for your food to come out or the sale on your house to go through.

Even if the circumstances are big deals, the stakes are relatively low if only because they are moments. You’ll get to the end of the line, the wedding day will come and go, and the plane will land after its final descent.

Learning how to be patient in these circumstances, whether ordinary or extraordinary, is how we cultivate the virtue of patience in our lives. If we can’t be patient in a restaurant, how can we be patient in any other area of our lives? These circumstances are the training ground of patience. They prepare us for the other three layers.

The second layer is relational patience.

We have to learn to be patient with others in order to live with them well. The difficulty level between the first and second layers jumps exponentially. Certainly, I’m still learning how to be relationally patient, sometimes the hard way. I’ve started to wonder if I’m becoming worse at it as I get older.

We might just be waiting for someone to respond to us or to make this decision or that decision, but we also might be waiting for someone to change. To stop harming themselves or others and to do what is right. We might struggle to be patient with someone’s actions or a specific character trait of theirs. You find yourself irritable with them and causing further harm to your relationship because you can’t simply be patient with them.

When it comes to the topic of deconstruction, I imagine this is where a lot of people are at. Parents impatient with their children’s choices or beliefs, wanting them to come back to Jesus. Children impatient with their parent’s rules or idiosyncracies or political persuasion, wishing they would simply stop being weird and actually have a real conversation with them and tell them they’re loved.

People do not change overnight.

This might also mean being impatient with yourself. How much of our negative self-talk happens because we simply aren’t patient with ourselves? We give slack to others but we beat ourselves up over every little mistake. We think if we are to get anywhere in life we have to have it all figured out tomorrow and don’t give ourselves permission to take our time and be a beginner again.

I think that, for many people, the concept of patience stops after these two layers. They know what it means to be patient in their circumstances or the mundanity of life and to be patient with others. And certainly, we never leave this layer. I’m learning lessons in this layer today.

But, for many, that is as far as the concept of patience goes. What else is there to be patient about?

Well, as it turns out, a lot.

The third layer is existential patience.

By existential patience, I mean adopting a long time horizon for every single thing in your life. You shift your default from instant gratification to playing the long game. You stop thinking in terms of days, weeks, and months, and start thinking in terms of years, decades, and a lifetime.

There are two ways this plays out.

The first is looking forward. Beginning with the end in mind. You imagine your life in reverse chronological order. You imagine what you want the end of your life to be like and reverse engineer it in order to aim your life in that direction.

What feeling do you want to have on your deathbed?
Who do you want to be around you?
What do you hope they say to you?

What has to happen in your life between now and then for that to happen?
What kind of person do you need to be?
What words do you need to say and to whom?
What habits do you need to kick?
What prayers do you need to pray?

We are patiently awaiting our death.

momento mori.

The second is looking backward. This is the one that I think is really tough.

Being patient with the things that have happened to you. All of us have Things that have happened to us. Things that to tell another person would be a courageous act of vulnerability. Things that regularly pop into our minds and consciously or unconsciously direct our lives. Things that we really don’t have any explanation for. Sometimes Layer 1 circumstances become Layer 3 Things. What do we do with those?

The answer: You’ll have to be patient.

These Things create an unbelievable amount of tension in our lives. The temptation to relieve that tension is all too strong. We rush to stuff them down or make the pain go away through unhealthy coping mechanisms (and even sometimes unhealthy therapy). We rush to change our minds or beliefs or friends or jobs or cities or churches or whatever. We just want to see it resolved as soon as possible.

I’ve been reflecting on this lately. I have a book coming out in less than two weeks that is the result of more than 15 years of dealing with doubt, death, discouragement, and disillusionment. The only reason I was able to write this book is because of the mistakes I made in trying to relieve tension in my life. Of trying to be “ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it” as G.K. Chesterton said about himself. In my attempt to deal with my Things, I was impatient with the Truth.

I’ve spent almost my entire life wondering what is the purpose of these Things that have happened to me. It’s only now, in two weeks, that I see this specific arc of my life come to a close. It’s not the only Thing. And certainly, that doesn’t mean I don’t deal with any Thing I’ve written in the book anymore. I do. But Things that were in the foreground my whole life are now fading to the background and I sense this chapter of my life closing.

More than 15 years later.

It’s not even all bad Things. Sometimes it’s good Things. A good thing happens, and then nothing. For years. But then the thread picks back up and moves forward. Then nothing, for a few more years. And then it picks up again. Who knows when it will finally pay off?

You thought that Bad Thing or New Skill or Big Opportunity would play itself out next month? Try 7 years from now. Maybe more.

The lesson I’m taking away from this is that some things take a decade or more to come to their conclusion. I wish I had more patience over the past decade.

But now I know.

The fourth layer is eternal patience.

We forget that the entire Christian life is a life of waiting.

Scripture leaves us with the words, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Some things won’t resolve in a decade or more. Some things won’t ever resolve on this side of eternity. There is nothing for us to do but to wait upon the Lord.

Hope—along with Faith and Love—is one of the keystone Christian virtues. Patience and Hope go hand in hand. Only hopeful people can be patient and only patient people can have hope. That’s why patience is a fruit of the Spirit. The Spirit molds us into patient people as we hope in the Lord and wait for him to return and make all things right.

And while it’s true what I said at the beginning—that the ordinary patience of life trains us to be patient relationally, existentially, and eternally—it is equally true that Hope produces patience in us that filters down into the rest of our life.

When we are truly Hopeful, we can be patient existentially, relationally, and in every other aspect of our lives. Because we know that, underneath everything, we are waiting on God. So we can wait on him in the Things of our lives. We can wait on him to move in our lives and the lives of others. We can wait on our ordinary circumstances because they pail in comparison to what we are waiting on from him.

In all of these ways, patience is a key ingredient in love. Because “Love is patient.” In waiting on God—in hoping in him—we cultivate a life of love. For the ways we are impatient, we repent and put our Hope back in the only one who is perfectly patient with us.

Come, Lord Jesus.

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I’ve written a book about deconstruction. It’s called Walking Through Deconstruction: How To Be A Companion In A Crisis Of Faith. It’s deeply personal, but it’s not a memoir. It’s an attempt to serve the church, to help the church understand what deconstruction is, what causes it, and how to walk with people who are experiencing it.