Patience & Impatience
“We are faced with a course of happening, a sequence of events in time, which is not of our making and which we cannot alter except within certain rather closely set bounds. We may not subvert its essential structure.
...The impatient man insists on ignoring this reality; he behaves as though it were in his power to make the trees grow more quickly and the earth revolve more quickly around the sun. Impatience renders us hard, unkind, masterful, and in some circumstances, violent. It always implies a loss of depth.
...a loveless rebuke sometimes amounts to a greater evil before God than a measure of lost time.
...Above all, the true Christian never pretends to a false position of supremacy over the universe. Indeed, Christian patience issues from religio: the consciousness of being a creature of God, whose property we are, without whom we can achieve nothing, and in whose hands all our endeavors, actions, and accomplishments are placed. The true Christian assents to his creaturely dependence on God, and consciously derives from it the informing principle of his life. ‘My days are in Thy hands’ (Psalm 31:15).
...For every deep, fateful word there is a fullness of time in which alone it can be legitimately and fruitfully spoken. Anticipate it hastily by acting without discretion, and your utterance of it will be shadowy, devoid of maturity, and invalid. Again, let the ‘destined hour’ pass unused, and you will no longer be able to speak that word except in an empty and purely formal fashion.
...For only in the measure that we have surrendered our inmost being to God do we possess ourselves.
...in the attitude of patience we emphatically let God act, thus allowing all things to unfold from above — as proceeding from their Origin — and by so experiencing their operation again render to God what is God’s.
...He alone who possesses patience — encompassed by disappointments, worn down by defeats, painfully aware of the narrowness of the road to salvation — can yet give proof of the constancy demanded by God, and hold on to the one thing necessary with a devotion not only unflagging but ever increasing.”
~Dietrich von Hildebrand
...The impatient man insists on ignoring this reality; he behaves as though it were in his power to make the trees grow more quickly and the earth revolve more quickly around the sun. Impatience renders us hard, unkind, masterful, and in some circumstances, violent. It always implies a loss of depth.
...a loveless rebuke sometimes amounts to a greater evil before God than a measure of lost time.
...Above all, the true Christian never pretends to a false position of supremacy over the universe. Indeed, Christian patience issues from religio: the consciousness of being a creature of God, whose property we are, without whom we can achieve nothing, and in whose hands all our endeavors, actions, and accomplishments are placed. The true Christian assents to his creaturely dependence on God, and consciously derives from it the informing principle of his life. ‘My days are in Thy hands’ (Psalm 31:15).
...For every deep, fateful word there is a fullness of time in which alone it can be legitimately and fruitfully spoken. Anticipate it hastily by acting without discretion, and your utterance of it will be shadowy, devoid of maturity, and invalid. Again, let the ‘destined hour’ pass unused, and you will no longer be able to speak that word except in an empty and purely formal fashion.
...For only in the measure that we have surrendered our inmost being to God do we possess ourselves.
...in the attitude of patience we emphatically let God act, thus allowing all things to unfold from above — as proceeding from their Origin — and by so experiencing their operation again render to God what is God’s.
...He alone who possesses patience — encompassed by disappointments, worn down by defeats, painfully aware of the narrowness of the road to salvation — can yet give proof of the constancy demanded by God, and hold on to the one thing necessary with a devotion not only unflagging but ever increasing.”
~Dietrich von Hildebrand
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