in many and various ways taught that patience is a spiritual virtue, it involves sitting on the banks of a river with your fishing rod and hook in the waters and waiting for your fish to swim by. Sometimes the wait is short and sometimes it is long but that is entirely outside the angler’s scope of control, he can only go as far as setting up the rod, the fish and the waters are outside his influence.
The farmer knows he/she can’t harvest without first sowing the seed even though he/she is not responsible for its growth. First, he/she prepares the soil in the best way he/she knows how, throws the seed into the ground, and leaves the rest to natural forces buried deep in the soil. The farmer recognizes that he/she is only part of a whole intricate scheme of things that must happen before harvest; in the meantime, he/she must sit and wait because the processes of time are not emotional, just realistic.
When soil lies bare, not many people see the opportunities in it because they don’t scream out, but if you have an eye, you can identify opportunity where others see waste. When the seed is buried beneath the soil, the surface looks as bare as it is unfarmed, but the reality is there is a lot of activity underneath that the naked eye can’t pick up. Many people have seen advantage where others have seen nothing.
Opportunity is rare and often surfaces at the most unexpected of places, if we can’t read beyond the obvious we miss it. No breakthrough is ever possible without learning how to wait and patiently watching the place where the seed was buried, Solomon wrote about wisdom, Pr 8:34(NLT) “Joyful are those who listen to me, watching for me daily at my gates, waiting for me outside my home.”
Waiting is futile if we don’t know what we are waiting for or if we are waiting at the wrong place. If we wait for a door to open, it has to be the right door at the right place, if you want bread you go to the bakery not the butchery. If we don’t know what we are waiting for we can’t identify it when it comes along, and if we are waiting at the wrong place, what we are waiting for may never come along. Waiting for what you don’t know or at the wrong place is foolish even if by some accident you end up with what you need. Waiting for what you know and at the right place is virtuous even if you may never find it; the spiritual processes at work are different.
On the natural, it is better to be foolish with something than be virtuous with nothing. That is to completely miss the crux of the “Kingdom Imperative” because the focus of the imperative is not on the finding but on the seeking. The finding is only an effect of the seeking, if you keep looking in the right places you will find what you are looking for. No seeking is complete until we find, just as no finding is complete unless the processes of waiting purify character. Shortcuts may deliver an end but they don’t produce the emotional robustness of the process. Victory, as Samson’s honey is sweeter if found in the carcass of a lion you killed. If you worm your way through any sort of achievement, you will lack the moral stronghold to sustain it.
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