Luke 8:15: Perseverance Is Patience Prolonged

But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop. - Luke 8:15

Paul says that "suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character and character, hope." (Romans 5:3-4). I have wondered whether being annoyed counts as "suffering" in this context. Because I am often annoyed. :-) It doesn't take a coliseum full of hungry lions or midnight raids and secret trials. A slow-moving buffet line or a shopping cart angled across the aisle of a grocery store will do it easily and with a lot less...fuss. l often mentally catalog ways that people could optimize their handling of a tedious situation to make it easier for other people. I am easily annoyed and, therefore, I am on the fast track to hope and saint-hood, right?

What I have found instead is that fostering annoyance or impatience leads me to be a more irritable and impatient person. And when I reflect on what I am saying (silently or out loud) and thinking (loudly) about other people in these circumstances, I find I am not a person whom I can admire.

So I have begun to do four things over the past few months:

1. Deliberately choose slower options, such as slower lanes of traffic or longer check-out lines. I call this the "discipline of the longest line". It is a means of fighting my me-first, critique-filled attitude and a means of testing where I am in this process.
2. Keep a tally of the number of times that I am impatient with people in these types of situations, 
3. Talk with God each time to discuss why I felt so entitled and in a hurry and 
4. Discuss this process with some that I trust. 

Why? Because I don't like the type of person I am when I am impatient. Because I am chronically in a hurry even when I have plenty of time. Because my wife and good friends see it also.

It's early days, so nothing is settled. I have gone from a high of about 18 or 19 incidents in a week to a record low of 4 this past week. Thanks to God's work through this, I am doing better in traffic and at stores, but I have found new areas. I didn't even know how irritable I am in buffet lines (12 "incidents" in one evening!) or airport security. Each time is a prompt to reset myself before God:

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

I hope that these seasons of patience ("perseverance") in the little things produces the harvest Jesus talked about. As farmers know, no harvest ever came without perseverance and perseverance consists of day-after-day patience in the same direction as God does his life-changing work.

But with character, there is hope. Hope that I can actually be different. Hope that I can actually be the person that Christ imagines in me.