Patience

Frequently when I order from Amazon I can get overnight delivery.

Once in a while I can get delivery in the next five hours if I order within the next hour. Trust me, these are rarely items that I need that quickly. I can easily wait 2-3 days for most of those items.

Sometimes we just need patience.

Following Jesus was a waiting game.

Many believed that Jesus was the one who would bring God's kingdom to earth RIGHT NOW. There was disappointment when he talked about the kingdom coming near, without giving a date and time.

People were impatient.

It makes sense. If they were lucky they earned sufficient wages in a day to pay for food. It was a hard-scrabble life. They were looking for hope and a better life in God's kingdom on earth.

But Jesus wouldn't tell them when that was going to happen.

And he left it to his disciples to preach patience after Jesus had bodily left them.

We live in a world of impatient people. There are the people who honk the instant the light changes. There are the people who race ahead, just to get to the stoplight three seconds ahead of you. There are the people who get impatient when a checkout line doesn't move as quickly as they think it should.

By not giving us the day and hour of the second coming, Jesus quietly taught us to have patience. As the writer of Colossians says, knowledge and faith in God gives us endurance and patience.

We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. (Colossians 1:9-13)

Ann Iona Warner