Wednesdays with Words (Patience)



This week I'm reading from The Fruitful Wife: Cultivating a Love Only God Can Produce by Haley DiMarco and got to the chapter on "Patience" when I found my toes being stepped on! Yes, I have quite a ways to go when it comes to excelling in patience.

Patience displays not only our faith in, and imitation of, the One who has been so patient with us in our sinful and ugly ways, but it also displays our trust in him. When you trust in God, you aren't prone to impatience, because impatience stems from not getting what you want. When you trust in God, what you want is his will alone, and impatience is less and less of an issue. Impatience implies that God has lost control; that things have happened that weren't meant to happen, and that life is out of whack. But for the believer who trusts in God's complete sovereignty, there is nothing that is too late, too slow, or unwelcome, because we know that it all first passes through the hand of God (see Lam. 3:8). When you are assured of this truth, you are set free from the bondage of impatience that prompts you to become controlling, critical, doubtful, fearful, or just plain restless. The restlessness of impatience that grinds on your gut and panics your mind is the opposite of resting in the Lord, of finding strength in his peaceful patience and his sovereignty over even our little inconveniences and catastrophes. p. 93