Needful

 Art may imitate life, but real life is not like the movies. The good guys don’t always win, the nice guy doesn’t always get the girl, and the story doesn’t wrap up in a bow with all the loose ends properly tied off in ninety minutes or less.

In real life, the good guy sometimes bleeds out next to a dumpster in an alley because he tried to help someone and got a knife in the belly as a thank you. In real life, there’s no last-minute miracle cure for the one you love, and you have to say goodbye for a while. In real life, people aren’t always noble or kind, and the lengths to which one human will go to hurt another beggars belief. I’m not even referring to strangers. I’m referring to people who took vows and promised to love and cherish the person they are currently trying to systematically destroy ‘till death did them part.

It’s because this life is not a fairy tale, and no one is spared trials and hardships, that patience is a virtue most necessary. God knows this. He’s known it all along, and since the dawn of creation, He put mechanisms in place to help us along on our journey and aid us in finishing the race we began running.

Patience is the means by which God molds our mindset and character. Like many other things, patience is a needful tool God employs liberally to bring us to where He desires us to be, daily refining, daily purifying, daily chiseling away the things not conducive to spiritual growth or maturity.

Some today want heaven without a relationship with God. They want to get saved without submitting to the Savior, and so the notion of needing to have their faith tested for the testing to produce patience in them is a foreign concept.

Just tell me I’m going to heaven, silly man. That’s all you need to do. I did the thing and said the prayer, now tell me I’m going to heaven and let me go on with my life. We’re busy people and have things to do; we don’t have time for your spiritual growth, maturing, getting to know God, and submitting to His authority pabulum. We just want assurances, not a relationship. We want the benefits without the membership. If you can’t offer us that, we know a few people who will.

We are so obsessed with the here and now; we are so focused on our flesh and how we can make it most comfortable that we fail to understand that the end result of developing patience is our spiritual health and well-being. Patience leads to being whole, complete, sanctified, and lacking nothing.

Even in those days, before the advent of the duck lip selfies and the Look At Me generation, James’s affirmation that we should count it all joy when we are tried, and our faith is tested was deemed a radical departure. Although this generation’s hedonism has no equal, men’s predisposition to shield themselves from hardship and trials has always existed. It’s human nature and has been since Lot looked upon the land and chose the place that would be easiest for flesh.

The testing of your faith determines the level of patience produced in you, and the level of patience you possess determines how you react to everything around you, whether directly or indirectly. I won’t sit here and insist that my patience level has been topped off and there’s no room for any more. I still bristle at bad drivers, but it’s a passing thing that fades fast and does not linger as it once did.

Even when I was young and impulsive and had no patience to speak of, I never entertained the idea of following someone for cutting me off or making a scene because the raisin in the Hot Granny t-shirt pushed right past me at the checkout. Granted, I had a few zingers ready to fire, such as false advertising is punishable by law, but I kept them to myself. If the Lord terries, by the time I’m seventy, I will have achieved enough patience wherein I don’t even bother with the internal zingers.

The point is that you must be able to look back and see how far you’ve come. I don’t mean looking back in the Lot’s wife kind of way, where you yearn for what was, but with gratitude and thankfulness for how far God brought you along the path of sanctification. You know where you started, just as I do. I can see how far I’ve come and the benefits of the patience the testing of my faith produced in me, and I’m thankful for them.

If you look back after six months, a year, or a decade, and you realize you’re rooted in the same spot, that you have the same penchants, predisposition, proclivities, and shortcomings, then though you may have done the thing with touching your television screen, you haven’t grown, matured, or made any progress.

You are stagnant, lifeless, with moss and weeds growing around your spiritual man because there has been no movement in such a long time. It’s not because God isn’t paying you as much attention or investing as much time as in others you see growing and maturing; it’s because you’re not making the time for Him, busy with everything else but time in His presence.

It’s not harsh; it’s the truth. If we knock, He will open. If we ask, He will give. If we do not have, it’s because we have not asked. If the door has not been opened, it’s because we haven’t knocked.

You’re wrong! I ask every day. Indeed, but what is it you ask for? Is it patience, faith, grace, joy, peace, boldness, and strength, or straight teeth and a winning smile? Ask God for the things a dentist couldn’t fix for a few bucks and thirty minutes with a drill. Ask for the things only He could give; then, when He gives them, you won’t be able to credit anyone else but Him.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.