Posted: November 18 by: Mark Harris

The expression “patient endurance” is what hit me in the devotional this morning. Started me thinking about just who really is cultivating this fruit.

I’m living with someone who daily has to practice patient endurance. (Not only because she has to live with me!) Adrienne spends her days teaching kids with either significant disabilities, or major behaviour issues, or both. I know that I couldn’t do it. I’d be hard pressed to patiently endure a day, let alone a lifetime calling.

There are others cultivating this fruit in amazing ways: people who are living with ongoing sickness, and the people who lovingly care for them; people with mental health issues that just don’t go away; people enduring a long journey of grief after the loss of a spouse; single moms, day in, day out, assuming responsibilities to love, responsibilities that seem more than daunting for a couple to take on. In many ways, these people are the silent heroes of the faith among us. They are embodying faithfulness, or patient endurance.

I sometimes wonder just who it is will get the highest rewards in the life to come. There are those who seem so strong and fruitful. But often (in our comfortable Western culture at least) the strong have had many graces come their way – education, health, a natural strength of temperament, a stable family. But what about those who live with a much more trying personal history, with weaker temperaments, and yet still in grace live lives not of Thoreau’s “quiet desperation”, but lives of quiet faithfulness instead. I have a feeling that they are the real heroes.

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