Prayer for patience, when it has already run out

Almost nobody asks for patience while they still have some. The request comes at the exact moment it has just run out: the sentence is already said, the tone has already changed, the message has already gone. It arrives afterwards, and it sounds more like regret than prayer.

There may be a reason for that, and it has to do with what we think we are asking for.

James does not ask for a virtue, he gives a deadline

The plainest passage in Scripture on patience fits in one verse, and it says nothing at all about character.

Be patient therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient over it, until it receives the early and late rain.

James 5:7 (World English Bible)

Read it again looking only for the word “until”. It is there twice, once in each sentence. James never writes “be patient” and stops. Each time he writes patient until something, and each time he takes the trouble to say what the something is.

The farmer does not ask whether he has enough

That detail changes what a person is actually coming to ask for.

“Give me patience” treats patience as a quantity. A tank, more or less full, emptying as it is used. On that logic you pray when the gauge is low, which is to say too late, and you ask for a top-up whose arrival you will have no way of noticing.

The farmer in the verse does not work like that. He never asks himself whether he is a patient man, the question does not arise for him. He knows two things: what he is waiting for, and roughly when it comes. His patience is not an inner reserve, it is a relation to a stretch of time whose end he knows. He is, in the English of this verse, patient over the field rather than in himself. He does not dig the seed up to check.

Which gives a rewording that looks like nothing at all. Instead of asking for patience, name the deadline. Not “make me patient”, but “hold me until Thursday”, “hold me until the result comes”, “hold me until this conversation is over”. The request becomes bounded, and therefore checkable, and it can be made again tomorrow without feeling like a failure to become someone else.

The sign that the end has gone missing

Two verses later, James says something that looks unrelated.

Don’t grumble, brothers, against one another, so that you won’t be judged. Behold, the judge stands at the door.

James 5:9 (World English Bible)

He has just been speaking about a long wait, and he moves straight on to how people talk to each other. The order is not an accident. A wait with no visible end does not stay where it is put. It moves toward whatever is within reach, and what is within reach is people. You can hold up perfectly well in front of the file that will not move, and be short with the person who asks how it is going.

The English word here is worth pausing on. Not “complain”, which is formal and addressed to someone, but “grumble”, which is a low noise with no particular target. That is exactly what an edgeless wait leaks.

It is the best alarm signal I know, because other people can see it before you can. If you are going sharp with someone who has nothing to do with it, that person is probably not what is costing you. An unbounded wait is.

If anger has already taken the whole room, that is a different page: the prayer for anger works on what rises fast, not on what lasts.

A prayer for patience

Here is a prayer written for this page. It does not ask for a temperament, it asks for a length of time.

Lord, it is not patience I am short of, it is the end. I do not know how long, and it is the how long that wears me down. Hold me until tonight. No further than that, I will not get further than that. Let me do today what today asks, without demanding to know how many more times. Keep my voice gentle with the people who have nothing to do with it. They are the ones it lands on when it spills. The time I am waiting through is already in your hands. Let me carry one day of it.

Notice what it does not ask for. It does not ask to become someone else, and it does not ask for the waiting to stop. It asks for a short deadline, and it names in passing the collateral damage, which is almost always a person.

And when you cannot see the end

The hard case remains, and James does not dodge it. Four verses later he changes his example and takes someone nobody had given a date to.

Behold, we call them blessed who endured. You have heard of the perseverance of Job, and have seen the Lord in the outcome.

James 5:11 (World English Bible)

The whole weight of the sentence is in a past tense: you have seen. Job did not see it while it lasted. He did not hold on because he knew how it would end. The outcome is visible afterwards, and James nowhere pretends otherwise.

There is something worth knowing here that only an English reader runs into. This verse, in the World English Bible, does not contain the word patience at all; it says endured, and perseverance. The word patience turns up instead in Paul, on a verse the French translation renders with perseverance.

But if we hope for that which we don’t see, we wait for it with patience.

Romans 8:25 (World English Bible)

The two translations swap the words on these two verses, and each is defensible. Which is the useful part: what these verses have in common is not a word, it is a shape. A stretch of time, and something at the end of it that is not yet in view. Hope, says Paul, is for what we do not see. Not seeing the end is the ordinary condition of waiting, not a fault in it.

Monica prayed for years for her son’s conversion, with no deadline, following him from Carthage to Milan. Augustine records what she told him at the end.

One thing there was for which I desired to linger a while in this life: that I might see you a Catholic Christian before I died. My God has granted this to me more abundantly.

Monica, recorded by Augustine, Confessions, IX, 10

She saw the end. Antoni Gaudí did not. He gave the last forty-three years of his life to a building site he knew he would not see finished.

There is nothing to regret in my not being able to finish the temple. I shall grow old, but others will come after me. What must always be preserved is the spirit of the work.

Antoni Gaudí, words on the Sagrada Família site (C. Martinell, Gaudí, su vida, su teoría, su obra, 1967)

These two lives do not say the same thing, which is exactly why they belong on the same page. One received her end and saw it with her own eyes. The other handed his to people he would never meet. Neither Monica nor Gaudí was issued patience in reserve. Both had an end in view, and for one of them it was not his own.

One thing to do today

A minute, before the next time it tightens.

Take the thing that is costing you at the moment and ask one question: do I know its end? Three possible answers, and each one gives a different prayer.

If there is a date, put the date in the request. “Hold me until the 20th.” It is short, it is checkable, and it renews tomorrow.

If there is no date but there is a sign, take the sign. The end of a course of treatment, an answer expected, the evening someone comes home. The farmer waits for the rain, not for a square on the calendar.

If there is neither date nor sign, then do not ask for patience: ask for the day. This one, and only this one. It is the measure that is left when all the others are missing, and it is the one James keeps for his longest example.

Then, in all three cases, add the line about people. It costs nothing and it prevents most of the damage.

If the waiting comes from a trial that has a name, the prayer in hardship takes that head on. And if it is a background restlessness that makes every hour long, the prayer for inner peace works somewhere else: on what tightens, not on what lasts.