May 9, 2025
Patience as a Spiritual Discipline
It is said that patience is a virtue, but patience is also a spiritual practice: a rehearsed behavior over time which allows the Spirit to form and reform you.
On the one hand I am a patient person in allowing things to unfold. On the other hand, I often meet my expected deadline or end date, even if it is not stated, and begin to want to accelerate things to move on. It is truly a challenge when I have no control over the process or events in question and have to trust God.
So, it is with the end of my academic career. I left Fuller Seminary with three doctoral students who wished to work with me to the completion of their dissertations. I thought they would all be done in two or so years. In fact, the first was done in about two years. The other two finished the week before and the week after Holy Week this year. It has been a busy past few weeks! But now I am finally almost done, even if it took almost twice as long as I expected. All that remains is for me is to hood the two of them on June 13 as part of their commencement exercises. The past few years I learned to be both patient and flexible with fires, COVID, health and family issues, and other complicating factors slowing my students’ work. This was part of my ongoing practice of patience.
Now that this particular season of waiting is ending, I am reminded of the “Matron” Saint of Patience, Monica, and what she teaches us about a faithful patience. Monica was a devout woman from North Africa who had a tremendous reputation as someone with deep spiritual insight and piety. So great was her reputation, she would travel to Milan in Italy to meet with Bishop Ambrose to discuss spiritual matters. Although a woman with a great spiritual reputation, her husband and son were men of ill repute. They had little to do with the Christian faith, and in the case of her frat-boy son, little to do with wholesome living.
Yet, Monica, persisted in prayer and continued to encourage her husband and son to consider new life in Christ. As unlikely as it seemed, she never gave up hope. Monica repeatedly saw examples of faith in the scriptures and in the church who “hoped against hope” (Romans 14:8). These examples gave her the encouragement she needed to prayerfully persist in confident faith trusting God in all things. Her son was the first to convert, with her husband being baptized later, just before his death. Her son, Augustine, who was somewhat reluctantly baptized by Ambrose, went on to become the Bishop of Hippo in North Africa and one of the most influential voices the western world, in and out of the church. Augustine wrote all about his conversion in what is considered the first autobiography in western literature, his Confessions. In it, Monica is always the example of faith to follow, not Augustine, or even Ambrose.
I offer this to you as more than a piece of historical trivia. The context of Monica and Augustine was the gradual decline and demise of the Roman Empire. People could not believe what was happening and never assumed the worst; life will correct itself, they thought. Rome is too big, too powerful, even too good to fail. Augustine responded by writing The City of God. It was written to those in Rome who saw the empire of which the church was a part beginning to crumble. Augustine’s reply was that human cities, human empires—all human enterprises—are always temporary. Nothing lasts forever; except that which God creates and establishes.
Likewise, in our current season, we are invited to be patient, to trust God and believe that working to forward God’s reign on earth, not human programs or establishments, creates results which will endure. Might we search the scriptures for reminders of God’s faithfulness and seek examples—past and present—of those sisters and brothers who persisted in their faith in spite of what looks to others as their futile efforts.
With the hope in the promise of resurrection, I invite you to begin practicing patience in this current season, allowing it to deepen your faith, buoy your spirit, and give you confidence that our earnest service to God will never fail to yield results—in God’s time.
With audacious hope,
~ Pastor Todd
A trivial footnote: Augustine created a rule for living in community which was followed by communities of women and men through the centuries. That became codified into a single religious order in the 13th century. The Augustinians became a preaching order, one of a few orders given permission to preach in the street in the vernacular before the Latin Mass. One of their monks, Martin Luther, was an especially effective street preacher. There are some Lutheran Augustinians in Sweden and in Michigan to this day. Our Chicago-born, US native Pope, Leo XIV, is the first Augustinian Pope, among his many firsts.