God is Patient

 

The day was hot and humid, the sky billowing with clouds. As I walked through the community garden I saw these green apples, well on their way to Fall perfection. They seemed a type of real life still life to me. What a pleasant surprise they were.

So many things in creation come along in their own time. The biggest difference is the length of the process. Apples come on and ripen in months. Rivers continue to find their course across millennium. Glaciers move across time immemorial. Some insects experience an entire life in the passing of a day. Everything else, including we humans, fall in the middle somewhere. But still, we are on the way to becoming throughout our life.

“The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.” The epistle tells us that God is patient and works over time, as long as it takes.

God is working for us to know forgiveness. God is working for us to find peace. And over the length of our days, God is working to make us over into the image of Jesus. All of this is the work of a lifetime. God is patient.

From time to time we run out of patience. We lose patience with ourselves. We lose patience with those around us. We even lose patience with God. But slow and steady like a loving glacier, God keeps just keeps moving forward, working all along the way for our good and God’s pleasure. In our own time, we too shall arrive.

Peace.