Oh Lord give me patience!

From The Very Rev Dr Kyle Norman

We don’t live our faith in a spiritual vacuum. Life is noisy; its busy, and its complicated. We live our lives in world filled with competing things all demanding our attention. We play a game but need to answer the phone in the middle of our turn; we make schedules and plans only to find that they need to be augmented to accommodate the immediate or the last-minute. We arrive at church only to find a big hole in front of it.

Faith is not an addition to our life, but a response to life as we meet it.  If we think that we can live our faith only when everything is calm and serene, perfect and uncomplicated, then we may find ourselves viewing every distraction and diversion as somehow a threat to our faith.  But this is never the case. It is in these moments when we find ourselves tried, harried, and even a little bit annoyed, where we recognise the call of faith.

So how do we respond to the fencing around our Cathedral, the hole outside our front door, and the endless line of fencing surrounding us? What is the faithful response? Well, St. Paul reminds us that the fruit of our faith involves patience.  Can we be patient when we would rather stomp our feet and demand immediate satisfaction? Can we be kind when all we want to do is scream?

Faith doesn’t mean that we don’t feel the sting of annoyance or frustration. Jesus bore the weight of the cross, and so too, we can recognise the discomfort created by the construction around us. What faith calls us to, however, is a response rooted in the loving patience of God. As we do so, allowing the presence of the eternally-patient one to shine through us, we may just find the hole doesn’t loom so big, and the fences don’t appear that bothersome.