Has Patience Become a Sin?

The first desktop computer I ever used was an IBM 386, delivered by a cheerful IT technician in 1984. I was mesmerized. Four years later, we bought our first home computer, an Apple IIGS, a few months before Apple abandoned the Apple II.

As impressive as those computers were at the time, the fact is that my iPhone today has more capabilities than those computers did. My iPad is far more portable than my laptop and can do just about as much. In fact, I have two iPads, a work laptop, a home laptop, and a home desktop. And my Kindle.

I’m wired.

And I’m socialized, too. Twitter (a personal account, individual and corporate accounts I manage for work, an an organizational account I manage). Facebook (a personal page and two organizational pages I manage). Google+ (personal).  And a bunch of other stuff I rarely have time to get involved with. And this blog, too, which I’ve been doing longer than social media.

At work, I’m usually living and operating on internet time. Fast. Sometimes frenzied. A crisis or two a day. One day we had six online crises happening simultaneously. The organization I work for has only recently began to understand a glimmer of what’s at stake when you operate in internet time. Many of the people I work with are doing a lot of their work they way it was done pre-internet, and even pre-email.

One of the effects of all of this technological capability is the end of patience. Our definition of fast has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. When I first accessed the internet, about 1993, I was amazed at what I could access in a few short minutes. Today, I am frustrated if anything takes a few short minutes.

Even the way we talk has changed. With the impact of television, politicians (and then the rest of us) learned to talk in sound bites. Now we talk in sound bits, preferably with a seven-second video.

This is a kind of technological madness. Ask my wife how much time she spends dealing with our sound system / cable access / television / internet. It’s quick, all right, when it works.

Our technology has made patience at best seem antiquated, at worst a sin.

In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove suggest something different.

“Western culture,” they write, “and increasingly global culture, is built on impatience. The inner restlessness of humanity is nothing new, bur for at least the last two centuries, the quickening march of technology and industrialization has formed us into a culture on instant gratification – which is another way of saying instant dissatisfaction.”

This impatience has permeated many of our churches, and it is the church that should be offering the alternative to it. This isn’t some ethereal theological discussion, but something that impacts us and our churches every day.

And the discussion is important. Patience, the authors of Slow Church point out, “is how compassion is embodied in our lives.” The less room we have for patience (or longsuffering, which is closer to the Biblical concept), the less room we have for compassion.

Compassion comes from rootedness, staying with the same local church body for the long haul, and not flitting from one church to another where our needs “might be better met.” It’s the continuity of being part of a local body where we Christians learn patience and compassion.

I’ve been devoting Mondays on this blog to a discussion of Slow Church, which I believe is one of the most important books I’ve read about the church. This chapter is entitled “Patience.”

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Tears

A few months ago, my friend David Murray posted on his blog about tears – and how he was noticing that the older he became, the more easily the tears seemed to flow.

David’s in his early 40s. I told him to wait until his 50s – when the real waterworks begin. Although, to be honest, I’ve always been prone to that most embarrassing of male actions – unexpectedly crying.

I cry at movies, both sad ones and the sappy parts of happy ones. I cry at moving passages of novels. I get teary-eyed with certain YouTube videos (like the ones that show the fathers/soldiers returning home from Iraq or Afghanistan and surprising their kids at school) (I get teary-eyed just writing about how teary-eyed I get with these). I read newspaper stories – like how the small church in Arkansas opened its doors to the families who lost relatives in the recent flash flooding at the park campsite – and my eyes fill.

Fortunately, my wife is used to it. But it’s embarrassing at work when I read something online that moves me to tears and then someone walks in my office.

There’s a good precedent.

Almost all of the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John is devoted to the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Very few miracles recorded in the New Testament get that kind of emphasis. And the pivotal verse of that chapter is v. 35, which also happens to be the shortest verse in the entire Bible.

Jesus wept.

That two-word verse is stunning. The creator of the universe did that most human of things, a thing often perceived (in males) as weakness – he wept.

The context is important, if a bit ambiguous. He sees Mary, sister of Martha, weeping at the death of her brother. He sees the Jews who are with Mary also weeping. And he is “deeply moved in spirit and troubled” (NIV). Still, he doesn’t cry at that point. He asks where the body of Lazarus is, and when the crowd says “come and see,” that’s when he cries. Then once more he’s “deeply moved” as he comes to the tomb. He prays, and tells Lazarus to come out. Some immediately believe; others rush off to report to the Pharisees and the chief priests, who decide that the time for Jesus to die has finally come.

As for his tears, was it the weeping of Mary and the crowd that prompted Jesus to share their grief? Was it the lack of belief in what Jesus was truly about that the crowd didn’t understand? Was it facing the death and the tomb of someone he dearly loved? Or was it seeing a picture of his own future before him, knowing what lay ahead – betrayal, beatings, the most horrible of deaths called crucifixion and then death? Yes, he knew the ultimate ending, but that didn’t prevent feeling the deepest emotions at what he was facing.

What is clear is that, in this case, he did the one thing he always resisted doing – he deliberately gave the crowd a sign. He raised Lazarus from the dead “that they may believe you sent me.”

It’s all there in two words, the whole story of his life, death and resurrection, the most astonishing story of compassion ever, told in tears, the tears that are a sign for us, a sign to me of what my own tears should remind me of.

Jesus wept.


To read more posts on compassion, visit Bridget Chumbley’s blog One Word at a Time.

Photo of man crying courtesy Photobucket.