This is a talk I did at my church in 2022 while my mum was visiting us for 12 weeks to get to know her new grandson. It was quite an appropriate topic for the situation!
My topic is ‘patience’ but as my close family can testify, I am the last person who should be teaching about patience – I am not a patient person, especially with them! But we are all works in progress so I will have to try to practice what I preach.
It has been said that to pray for patience is a dangerous prayer – there is a quote I like that explains why by Morgan Freeman playing God in one of my favourite movies ‘Evan Almighty’, which is a modern day Noah’s Ark story. It goes as follows:
“Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If he prayed for courage, does God give him courage, or does he give him opportunities to be courageous?”
There is some more to that quote but I will get back to it later on.
God is not bound by time like we are and you have probably noticed that He is in no hurry! He is in the habit of teaching by experience and letting things run their course. There are many great examples of people waiting on God for various things in the bible – see if you can remember some.
I think there are 2 main types of Patience – waiting on God and waiting in everyday human situations. I am probably marginally better at the first, but like most people I still try to find ways to hurry Him along like Abraham and Sarah did with their plan to conceive a child. God’s timing is perfect, although we may not always agree with this when we are in the midst of waiting on something important or are in a horrible situation. I’ll give you examples of both types in my own life.
The start of Samuel 1 tells the story of his mother Hannah. She is one of 2 wives of Elkanah. The other wife Peninnah had children and tormented Hannah because she did not have any. Every year the family travelled to Shiloh to worship the Lord and one year this happened:
Samuel 1
One day, Elkanah was there offering a sacrifice, when Hannah began crying and refused to eat. 8 So Elkanah asked, “Hannah, why are you crying? Why won’t you eat? Why do you feel so bad? Don’t I mean more to you than ten sons?”
9 When the sacrifice had been offered, and they had eaten the meal, Hannah got up and went to pray. Eli was sitting in his chair near the door to the place of worship. 10 Hannah was heartbroken and was crying as she prayed, 11 “Lord All-Powerful, I am your servant, but I am so miserable! Please let me have a son. I promise to give him to you for as long as he lives, and his hair will never be cut.”
12-13 Hannah prayed silently to the Lord for a long time. But her lips were moving, and Eli thought she was drunk. 14 “How long are you going to stay drunk?” he asked. “Sober up!”
15-16 “Sir, please don’t think I’m no good!” Hannah answered. “I’m not drunk, and I haven’t been drinking. But I do feel miserable and terribly upset. I’ve been praying all this time, telling the Lord about my problems.”
17 Eli replied, “Go home. Everything will be fine. The God of Israel will answer your prayer.”
18 “Sir, thank you for being so kind to me,” Hannah said. Then she left, and after eating something, she felt much better.
19 Elkanah and his family got up early the next morning and worshiped the Lord. Then they went back home to Ramah. Later the Lord blessed Elkanah and Hannah 20 with a son. She named him Samuel because she had asked the Lord for him.
This was like me in 2017, but not in regard to a child – it was in relation to my desire to get residency in New Zealand (the yearning for a child came later and thankfully I didn’t have to wait nearly as long)! I was so desperate to get residency that it consumed all my thoughts and I was fearful of what would happen if we didn’t get it. I wondered how we would ever get it as it was getting harder and harder each year to get through dairy farming. I’d decided I needed to move into mental health work (which is what I knew God wanted me to do) but I had no idea how to go about it as we only had dairy work visas. I was a fairly new Christian then and so I also started to get anxious that God was going to get angry with me for putting this desire above everything else in my life, including Him, and would somehow punish me or not let us get it. I was quite a mess when I went up to get some prayer at the alter one Sunday at my old church in Ashburton. As I waited, a lady who didn’t usually minister in prayer came to me with a word from God before I even told her what was wrong. She had been holding onto it all morning through the first service and the break and then the second service, wondering who she was supposed to give it to until she saw me. She quoted the story we just heard from Samuel and then this is what she had already written down to give to me –
‘Hannah at the altar was desperate for a baby. What are you desperate for from God? Eli saw her and thought she was drunk, that’s how desperate she was… but when she told him what it was, his reply was that God would honour her request. That’s also how it is right now… God gave Hannah her baby and He’s going to birth in you something that you’ve been seeking’.
I clung dearly to this word from God with renewed hope, knowing that we would get residency somehow, but still having no idea how it would happen and especially no idea that it would take so long (5 years)! Things did all slowly and miraculously fall into place step by step to get me closer to being able to apply. God moved me into the jobs that He wanted me to be in, in His own time, no matter how hard I tried to anticipate and push in the directions I thought I should be going. We had some huge disappointments along the way, but that word from Him is what kept me going and believing that we would still get it, even when it seemed impossible.
We only got our residency in March 2022 and as it happens, it didn’t even matter what job I was in as we got it under the special new resident visa which was created as a result of covid! So even if I hadn’t followed the path that God was leading and had done my own thing or just stayed in dairy farming, we would have got it anyway as He promised – and with a lot less struggling and striving! But I did learn a lot and get to minister to a lot of different people along the way (see my posts about ‘my calling’).
I must admit though, that I have always held onto a bit of fear around the part where Hannah promised to give her son back to God, and what this would mean in my situation. What, if anything, will God want back from me in return and when? We now have permanent residency 2 years later – this could have been around the time that Hannah gave Samuel back to the Lord…
- Have you ever had to wait on God for an answer to prayer?
- Have you ever been so desperate for something like Hannah was?
- Were you sure He would answer? Did He give you any promise or scripture to hold onto to keep your hope alive?
- Have you ever tried to force an answer or cheat like Abraham and Sarah?
- Did you feel like you owed God something after He answered your prayer?
Now the second type of patience is much easier to identify with as it is a part of everyone’s everyday lives, so we should all be able to think of some examples!
- What’s the difference between human patience and Godly patience?
- How do we fare when tested in human situations which require patience?
- Think of some examples of things that really test your patience!
- Have you found that patience comes easier with age/practice?
- Has your faith helped you be more patient?
For me, patience is the hardest with those closest to me – for example, I find it much easier working with people with challenging mental health issues in my job than with my husband!
But really, I think that the 2 types are probably linked: As Jesus said in Matt 25:40 in regard to a few different things – ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’ And we are also told in Luke 16:10-14 – ‘Whoever can be trusted with small things can also be trusted with big things. Whoever is dishonest in little things will be dishonest in big things too. If you cannot be trusted with worldly riches, you will not be trusted with the true riches’.
Now back to the quote at the beginning. The rest of it is as follows:
“If someone prayed for the family to be closer, do you think God zaps them with warm fuzzy feelings, or does he give them opportunities to love each other?”
Having my mum here was the perfect opportunity for me to practice my patience, but I still felt like I was failing every day and I still do with my husband. It is hard to break the habit of a lifetime so please pray for me and hold me to account! My mum will visit again this year too 😊