Presented by Lauren Stibgen

Patience is often framed as an outward expression. We are told to have patience with situations and people, timing and circumstances. How can we reflect patience in very specific ways to help ourselves become even more impactful at work and in life overall? And how will this impact ultimately help us fulfill our true vocation—to shine the light of Christ in this world?

Those of us in Christ Jesus are “the salt of the earth, and the light of the world meant for people to see our good works and give glory to our Father in heaven.” This is a paraphrase of Matthew 5:13-15.

Working on our saltiness and our light calls us to consider our own behaviors and habits with patience. After all, how can we seek to maintain our salt and light if we are impatient?

What is impatience? Defined as the tendency to be impatient; irritability or restlessness, it feels agitated and wrought with anxiety and fear. Impatience feels consuming to me. Something that can keep me up at night thinking about all of the ways I need to solve for a situation or maybe how something has gone terribly wrong. It certainly doesn’t feel at all settled. And it certainly doesn’t feel like seeking the Lord.

Our God is all about patience with us. I recently shared that my own salvation happened when I was 30. God worked and worked for 30 years until that moment. He used my story to draw my grandmother to himself when she was 80! Yes 80. She is now 94 and recently shared her musings with me about how our bodies will be transformed in heaven. We both said, “Thank God!” You see, I have every reason to believe in the long game. We need to consider God’s timing on matters and his lavish patience as we decide to hone our own patience for increasing our own salt and light!

God waited 4,000 years between the fall of Adam in Genesis to Jesus’ birth in Matthew. We learn in 2 Peter 3:8 that: with the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day. When it comes to considering patience, we need to reflect on how finite our human view on time is. It is a clock with seconds, minutes, and hours and a calendar of days. But this is clearly not God’s view on time. This 4,000-year gap between the fall and our Savior did not feel long to God at all.

With this view of time in mind, let’s consider our own patience in the form of habits. There are so many books and articles about habit formation. A simple Google search will tell you that building a habit can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days with the average being 66 days. I loved reading the article “How Long Does it Really Take to Form a Habit?” on scientificamerican.com which stated that the 21 days to habit formation is a myth. To me this makes sense considering God’s timing and in his creation of you and me as individuals made in his image. In the eyes of God, our habit formation should be dependent on him. Thinking about anything we want to accomplish should start with developing a healthy patience and reliance on God alone.

Another term used for biblical patience is long-suffering. Having a long view of habit formation of any kind will surely give us endurance to not cave into the pressures of the moment, to give into impatience in reaching our desired results! Be encouraged his mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:23). Every morning, we are blessed with a new day to start forming good habits——we just need patience and to know God is patient with us!

Having God-centered habits can help us maintain patience! And patience is powerful. Patience brings presence and perseverance. It can help you rise!

Let’s talk about five habits for maintaining patience.

First, wait on the Lord.

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes (Psalm 37:7).

When we see others around us perhaps making more progress than we feel we have been making,