Sacrifice, Suffering, and the Patient Soul

Ryan

Published in

Heart in Pilgrimage

5 min readFeb 6, 2017

And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied:

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.

And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

In these few short lines Minnie Louise Haskins captures something of the journey of becoming patient. She begins, as we all do, needing to know comprehend the year ahead, needing to grasp and understand the future so that she can shape and control her own fortune. The speaker is insisting that her life plays out entirely according to her own will.

Then the poem cuts to a second voice, a whisper inviting her to let go of the reigns, to stop struggling against the crashing waves of life, to step out into the darkness and allow God to take control of her life.

Within the complex narratives of the Bible this theme of patience is explored explicitly in a call to wait for God. The Old Testament is a story about a people waiting for a promise to be fulfilled. We too, are caught in the no-man’s land between a world which has been redeemed but is still waiting for Christ to come again. We are told to suffer in the agony of a broken world, not knowing when God’s kingdom of peace will come. In this we are told to be joyful in a place of unknowing.

Joyful waiting is indeed a symptom of a patient soul but I believe that there is far more depth to be explored. Impatience, a familiar companion to us all, is this inability to cope when life does not play out according to our hopes and desires. For some, walking behind a slow tourist is so traumatic because there is a severe clash between our desire for efficiency and their hopes of leisure. For myself, I often find is so inconceivable that others cannot understand and articulate things well- I hold other people to the impossible standards to which I hold myself and become angry with people for being slow. For all of us, we desire life to happen on our own time scale, and when God asks us to wait we end up frustrated with the world.

Underlying all of these scenarios is the assumption that our particular way of muddling through life is perfect and that anything else is in some way incomplete or lesser. This demonstrates a total lack of empathy and sympathy with our fellow human beings- we lift up our own worldview onto a pedestal. Put simply, when we become impatient with life or another person we begin to focus entirely on ourselves and forget that we are called to serve others.

If that damning account is impatience, what then can be said about patience? It seems that patience is a joyful willingness to let go of our own expectations in order to give way to the needs of others. When we let go of our own desires we suffer for it, we make a sacrifice for the glorification of others and ultimately of God.

We see this in Christ’s dealings with his disciples. These men were slow learners, gradually realising that Jesus was the son of God, yet continuing to reject him until He was taken up into heaven. Christ lived with them and allowed them the space to comprehend that which He already knew. Jesus surrendered the need to be recognised and understood because He knew that the disciples needed time.

Again, with the Pharisees, time and time again they tested, prodded and poked Him. They insulted Him with their trick questions and insults. Yet, as St Peter tells us, ‘when He was reviled, [he] did not revile in turn : when He suffered, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to Him who judges righteously; who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree’ (1 Peter 2.23–4).

In the Garden of Gethsemane we see Christ devastated by his approaching execution. He begs with His Father, asking Him to find another way, to choose another path. But when no other option avails itself, Jesus willingly sacrifices Himself, He readily sets aside His own desires and preferences and suffers on our behalf so that we might have life.

Patience is such an important witness to the world because it reveals something of the Kingdom of God. When we joyfully and willingly suffer for the sake of another, we give ourselves over in love to each other. When we choose to love each other patiently we choose to follow the example of Christ. As a community, when our desire to serve one another overcomes our desire to serve ourselves, we begin to find our identity in Christ as a people of sacrifice and a people of love.

When the poets speak of finding peace in the act of patience, that is not to say that our suffering ceases, we are not numb to the world, by no means will it be any less irritating to walk slowly behind a doddering tourist. Instead, we begin to find purpose in upholding the needs of others above our own, of the leisure of the tourist over our own cult of efficiency. We learn the importance of being a people who give control back to God.

To say with Minnie Louise Haskins that we ‘trod gladly into the night’ masks something of the uncertainty and the terror of putting God’s will above our own, is does not express our suppressed desires and forgotten plans. However, it does capture the love and the life that is created when we become a community of sacrifice.