Why I Appreciate Trinity #10: Patient & Accountable

#10. Patient - Accountable
Beloved Trinity, thank you for your patience. I suppose I notice your patience because I have been the recipient of it so often. You have been patient with starts and restarts and slow processes. You have been patient with my “out of seasons.” You have been patient with new ideas and new people. When I think of some of the things 30-year-old Nathan said in conversations, sermons, and council meetings it makes me gasp at your patience. Sometimes patience is confused for disengagement. You think people are being patient, but actually, they just don’t care. That is NOT you. You care about communication and process and vision. You care about Jesus and this precious congregation of his.

Alan Kreider wrote a great book last year called The Patient Ferment of the Early Church. Let me quote from near the beginning.

Patience was not a virtue dear to most Greco-Roman people, and it has been of little interest to scholars of early Christianity. But it was centrally important to the early Christians. They talked about patience and wrote about it; it was the first virtue about which they wrote a treatise, and they wrote no fewer than three treatises on it. Christian writers called patience the “highest virtue,” “the greatest of all virtues,” the virtue that was “peculiarly Christian.” The Christians believed that God is patient and that Jesus visibly embodied patience. And they concluded that they, trusting in God, should be patient—not controlling events, not anxious or in a hurry, and never using force to achieve their ends...As we ponder patience, we will come closer to understanding the resilience and distinctive lifestyle of the early Christians that led to their growth in numbers. (Pages 1-2)