Let Patience Have Her Perfect Work
Written December 4, 2022
Last week I found myself relating to Habakkuk’s complaining about the delayed timing of looked for results. At the outset of deciding to build our own home, I felt the assurance of the Spirit that though it would involve long and difficult work, the Lord would move this mountain, and provide the miracles necessary to successfully complete it.
Lately however I, like Habakkuk, have been impatient for more immediate results. Winter has been cold and windy, and there has been ice and snow on the roof, so the work on our home has been slow and painful. We’ve wrapped the house in raging winds where the wind catches the ten-foot-wide roll and billows it out like a sail. We’ve spent a whole day in arctic wind with numb fingers and toes to complete just a couple rows of roofboards at the peak of the roof. Sometimes it feels like a lot of effort for not very visually impressive outcomes.
I’ve been rereading James Clear’s Atomic Habits and I was struck by a reason he gives for people giving up on habits. He says that most people will stop a new habit because they expect noticeable improvements to appear almost right away. And when the results they are looking for aren’t apparent inside of two months they quit. But he points out that results often lag habits in what he calls a plateau of latent potential energy. This stage reminds me of the Lord’s pattern of creating spiritually before temporally.
Those few that persist, who focus on the process- putting in the small and consistent daily effort- instead of the outcome, eventually cross “a critical threshold” where they appear to others to have become an” overnight success”. Only they know the true cost of years of diligent effort that led to that impressive achievement.
I’ve started to reflect on why it is best for us that good things take awhile and involve struggle. I think the Lord lets us struggle so he can bless us. “Sacrifice brings forth the blessings of heaven”. I think he lets us struggle so we will look to Him and learn to follow Him not because it will yield results, but because we’ve come to know and love Him. I think he lets us struggle so we will know beyond a shadow of a doubt when the goal is obtained, that it was Him who delivered us, not ourselves.
James 1
4 But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
And I think he lets us wait because we become perfected in the waiting.
I’ve learned working with wood that it is quirky, individual, and rarely straight. (Matt and I call the pieces that are noticeably heavier and more fragrant the ones with “good souls”). The scriptures use clay to describe us as we are shaped by the Lord, but I think sometimes until I have been worn down by a challenge, I can be more rigid like wood than pliable like clay.
The struggle gets me to a place where I become soft, teachable, trusting, and humble. In my desperation I learn to cry out to the Lord in more effective prayer and I pay more attention to hearing Him.
If King Limhi’s people were delivered quickly, before learning to cry unto the Lord and submit cheerfully to their burdens, they would have been denied a lot of their growth that came as they learned patience and trust in the Lord’s timing.
The prophets teach us to do “small and simple things” and to “everyday be a little better”. I think miracles are rarely dramatic, more often they are the result of small incremental changes in our desires. Our thoughts. And our actions. In that order. Thus, miraculous changes can be taking place long before we or others around us may see them with our physical eyes.
As we exercise the faith necessary to do God’s will every day, I think we like Habakkuk discover that if it doesn’t really matter to us anymore whether our labors bear fruit, we will rejoice and look to the Lord as our strength (Habakkuk 3:17-19). We will love and follow Him for its own sake. We will plant and weed and reap and trust the results of the harvest to Him. He is the “Lord of the Harvest” after all.
