Patient: Lent XVII

The eyes of all wait upon you . . . 

 - From Psalm 145

Lent is about waiting, as is Advent.

Two seasons out of the Church calendar, each lasting about a month; devoted entirely to waiting.

That's one-sixth of the year.

Christians need to be patient. There were four hundred "Silent Years" between the end of the Old Testament, and beginning of the New. The Seven Days of Creation were probably "days" in God's eternal, timeless reckoning - seven essential time periods, or steps, which to us would be rendered something differently than twenty-four hours (how long were the days prior to the creation of the Sun?)

"The Day of the Lord" describes a day that is not necessarily twenty-four hours long. It really means the "now" of the Lord. Any time God acts, it is His day. A thousand years of Armageddon may be over with in a flash.

On the first day of a month, you relax, thinking you have an entire month to complete some project. But then a few days pass and you realize you are now in the middle of the month.

Time is a very fluid thing. If a day seems to go on forever, was it really the same length as a day that goes by in a flash? And if we're sleeping in the grave for two millennia, once we wake up, is it not basically, to us, the same day that we died?

We wan wait. We can do this. We can be patient.

This is why Love is such a simple, basic thing to practice.

You can practice love. Because life is short . . . and in eternity it will not seem that big of a deal. We can tolerate others. We can wait for marriage. We can put off eating, until dinner time. We can take our time on important tasks, and give them our best, quality, attention.

We can wait for the Lord. We need to be patient.