Day 22 - Patience is a virtue?

Reading: John 11:1-37

It is said patience is a virtue. I’m not so sure about that. I think it depends what is meant by ‘virtue’… Margaret Thatcher perhaps summed it up best when she said, “I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

In our passage today Lazarus is seriously ill and his sisters Mary and Martha send word to Jesus. The news reached him and Jesus dropped everything he had planned and set off to Bethany to be with his good friends. Except he didn’t. He stayed put. For two days. In fact by the time he arrived Lazarus had already been dead four days. It seems a cruel way to treat good friends.

How must Mary and Martha have felt during those long days, initially expecting Jesus to arrive quickly, then as each day passed thinking maybe it will be today… And then their brother dies. With still no sign of Jesus. Doesn’t he care? Has he forgotten them? Have they upset him in some way? Or did he never really love them at all?

When something does not happen when we want and the way we want – the way we prayed – we become frustrated, annoyed, maybe doubting God’s love for us. Life should always pan out the way we want… as if we are the ones in control. But we aren’t. God is. And sometimes he needs to take us through things we’d rather not experience. Because what we naturally think is that it’s always about me. We forget we might be part of the answer to somebody else’s prayers – but to be that answer God has to change us first. In today’s passage when Jesus talks with Martha as he nears Bethany she makes the most amazing confession of faith in verse 27. Even in the midst of her raw grief. Imagine how God can use her now...

So when we have a bit of a rant at God for not doing things the way we want let’s pause and remember that it’s not him who needs to change.

Response

Paul suggests a good recipe to follow: “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer” (Romans 12:12).

Chris