09/22/2024 - Fruit Of The Spirit - Patience 2024

The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. Psalm 103:6-14 (NIV) Are you the tortoise or the hare? In this classic Aesop fable, a tortoise and a hare embark on a race. You likely remember reading this tale in elementary school. The hare is obviously faster than the tortoise. The tortoise doesn’t even refute this fact, so the idea of a race is absurdly comical. Yet–spoiler alert–the tortoise wins the race! What’s fascinating about this story is not necessarily who wins, though that is a surprise for a room of first graders. But the real point of the story is how: slow and steady wins the race. The image of the slow and steady tortoise is the essence of what patience looks like to me. Admittedly, my natural disposition is much closer to the hare. I like to zoom, zoom, zoom from here to there. If a project takes too long, there’s a high chance I’ll “take a break” and never finish it. There’s a stack of close to 10 books on my nightstand with bookmarks ⅔ ways through because I couldn’t make it to the end fast enough. The patience isn’t there–not with myself, and at times, not with others either. But slow and steady wins the race. Read More at https://www.fbcmuncie.org/blog