The Cost of Impatience
Therefore, brothers and sisters, you must be patient as you wait for the coming of the Lord. Consider the farmer who waits patiently for the coming of rain in the fall and spring, looking forward to the precious fruit of the earth. You also must wait patiently, strengthening your resolve, because the coming of the Lord is near.
–Jas. 5:7-8
James is all about doing.
For James, any Christian who is not a doer of the word is like the person who forgets his reflection right after looking in the mirror. How can someone see your faith when your actions aren’t faithful? But then he throws us a curveball and directs us to “wait patiently for the coming of the Lord is near.”
Wait patiently?
Surely James understands that waiting is the very opposite of doing! But what James is trying to help us understand is how we wait matters. To see why it matters, we need to ask one more question: what is the cost of impatience?
Consider the farmer who, out of her impatience, takes it upon herself to water her crops before the rainy season begins. On the following day, rain pours from heaven above, and now her entire crop is ruined. Whenever we act impatiently, “we lose the very possession of ourselves.” [1] The more sinister cost of impatience over our earthly desires is that it leads us to forget our heavenly desire, the one who we are ultimately waiting to burst through the door, God himself. Or as Paul says:
We have access by faith into this grace in which we stand through him, and we boast in the hope of God’s glory. But not only that! We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. (Rom. 5:2-4)
Patience is a gift of grace given by the Spirit that equips us to endure whenever “evils arise. It is the quality by which we are able to choose to stay put and endure arduous and difficult things for the sake of the good.” [2] Patience keeps us fixated on our hope and shields us from acting out of our restlessness as we wait for the coming of the Lord. Patience grounds us, molds us, and forms us into the kind of people God calls us to be in the here and now.
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[1] St. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Rule III.9.104.
[2] Daniel McInerny, “Fortitude and the Conflict of Frameworks” in Virtues and Their Vices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 84.
