patience comes to those who wait.

This was a favorite saying of my high school youth pastor's. Not "good things come," but "patience comes." His adage, I think, is truer.

I find myself forced to live patiently in another question. I'm not good at being patient, but I feel more strongly than I care to that this time I must be. It's not an option, Smalls. It's hard when the phone doesn't ring, but this reminds me that I have to keep on living my life in the best way possible, independently of anyone else. This means a return to discipline, a rededication to joy and contentment where I am, and a renewal of childlike trust in the Creator who guides my life along paths that are straight in spite of my failure to see it. The fault is with my eyes, with my mortality, with my human limitations; and while God is not angry with me for these, he does require that I put my hand up to his and follow diligently where he leads, surrendering my failures to his care. Faith is the completion of the small or great things that I lack.

It's something like Orual's and Psyche's observations in Till We Have Faces. Brought into contact with divinity, mortality feels keenly its own limitations and is ashamed of them. But "perfect love driveth out fear," and this is what I must remember and hold fast to. And this is what makes faith possible: that the God who has me by the arms and teaches me to walk has my best at heart, out of love. The same love that called the world into being with a word, with The Word, who roped himself in flesh to fill a depth in me that I cannot fathom and to bring many people impossibly together in that love. And who does not hold my empty hands against me, but shows me how to use them, to add a few stones to a kingdom.

Now for the patience. And the trust.