These pictures document the slow and sometimes painful process of waiting for the pieces to come together. Most immediately, we are waiting for construction to finish on our new roof-top room so that we can leave our current home– the humid, ground floor room whose prominent location perpetuates a constant stream of visitors at all hours, and reminds me of a dark cave with its lack of natural light. But in a deeper sense, we’re waiting for the pieces of life here to come together. We’re looking for what the next step is—what kind of roles and work we should take on, and how to begin to put our skills and ideas into action to respond to the needs we see around us. And yet we know that the “next step” flows out of exactly what we’re doing now—getting to know people, studying verb conjugations and vocabulary lists, and all of the unspectacular daily moments, tasks, and conversations that comprise our being present and available exactly where we are, right now.

I usually don’t think of patience as a virtue. I equate it with tolerance for wasting time. It is a void of passivity, a willingness to be unproductive or to carry on with a bad or fruitless situation longer than is necessary. But seeing as the Holy Spirit herself (the Hebrew word for spirit, ruach, is indeed feminine) works with extreme patience in human hearts through millennia of obstinate and destructive human behavior, patience is probably a virtue worth revisiting—because I don’t have any patience at all.

It’s probably true that at times the justifying label of “patience” has been slapped onto exactly the kind of laziness or passivity I described a moment ago. But perhaps a more accurate way to think of patience is to connect it with perseverance: a courageous, stubborn, single-minded determination that is bent on accomplishing some purpose or at least bent on holding one’s ground and keeping the faith, no matter how much time it takes to accomplish, or to come into being. Patience is often a willingness to actively wait for something that we really have no power to bring into being ourselves; something that God must accomplish, or something that God has already finished, but the outward evidence of which is not yet apparent.

We need the kind of tenacious patience that can bear the present difficult circumstances without skipping ahead to the future to either catastrophize about how badly everything might turn out, or to dream up alternative plans and means of escape from the present difficulties. We need fierce patience that refuses to give up because of lack of results or weight of disappointments in the short-term. We need tender patience to continue to journey alongside the people in our lives even when they take destructive actions and make destructive decisions, when they manipulate or get angry with us, when they act in self-interest instead of in friendship, when they fail to change or to meaningfully respond to what we’re hoping to model and teach and draw them into.

Isn’t that what She does with us, Ruach Ha Kodesh, the Spirit of God?  Isn’t that the way that She picks up the pieces again and again and re-imagines the path to wholeness as she labors over us individually, and as the Church, and as humankind? I want to be patient as She is patient; longsuffering and uncomplaining like She is in her relentless love of each one of us. I’ve got a long way to go.