BE PATIENT | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 4, 1889

BE PATIENT.

BE patient with your friends. They are neither omniscient nor omnipotent. They cannot see your heart, and may misunderstand you. They cannot know what is best for you, and may select what is worst. Their arms are short, and they may not be able to reach what you ask. What if also they lack purity of purpose and tenacity of affection? do you not also lack these graces? Patience is your refuge. Endure, and in enduring conquer them, and if not them, then at least yourself. Above all, be patient with your beloved. Love is the best thing on earth, but it is to be handled tenderly, and impatience is the nurse that kills it.

Be patient with your pains and cares. We know it is easy to say and hard to do; but you must be patient. These things are killed by enduring them, and made strong to bite and sting by feeding them with your frets and fears. There is no pain or care that can last long. None of them shall enter the city of God. A little while, and you shall leave behind you the whole troop of howling troubles, and forget in your first sweet hour of rest that such things were on the earth.

Be patient with your deferred hopes. The heart is sick, no doubt, but sick hearts must take the tonic of patience. The hope itself is put in peril by the impatience that weakens and prostrates your strength. Here also you have no better resource than patience. You will reach next year just as soon by taking it quietly; the end of your preparation for life's work—your apprenticeship or college course—will come of itself. The end of your labor is not far beyond, and need not be sighed for or impatiently expected. Clad in patience, your walk is an invisible armor, against which temptations to repine fall harmless. Put on patience against your hungry hope.

Be patient with God. It seems almost irreverent to counsel you so. And yet, you know that even against God you have cried out in your impatience. Your garden did not bloom in season or bear fruit in abundance, and in your heart you said: "God will never reward me according to my works. He has flowers for others and fruit even for the ungodly, but me he leaves in want. When shall my turn come?" Be patient. He has one time, and you have another. Your time is when you desire; his time is when you can use. He sees your day of real want; you see only the hour of capricious wishes. For him and for you there is abundance of time. His years shall not fail, nor will yours. You can afford to wait. Be patient.—Selected.