Endurance

Last Sunday's gospel ended with the haunting words, 'By your endurance you will gain your lives' [Luke 21, 19]. The word endurance could also have been translated by the word patience. Patient endurance is a great virtue, but not one highly prized in our swiftly moving society, where e-mail is preferred by so many to what is unkindly called snail mail and where our awareness of what is happening in what were once thought of as far off places is brought to us at once by television The quicker the better, the sooner, the better pleased we are. To have to wait seems to many of us a waste of time. Quick results are better than those for which we are required to wait. All of this means that the virtue of which Jesus speaks is ignored or at best undervalued. Saint Paul , also, in his letter to the Romans has the following stirring message, when he writes; 'Suffering brings endurance and endurance produces character' [Romans 5, 3]. In other words we may not enjoy suffering, few of us do, but it brings with it the chance of strengthening our characters. Time and adversity may seem on the surface to be hostile and undesirable, but they contain hidden blessings. We become better people simply by having to put up with the difficult and unexpected challenges life has to offer.
This important truth is often lost or at best ignored not only by people who are impatient with waiting, but also by those whose natural abilities enable them to achieve results with greater speed than most of the slower witted. To such quick minded, brilliant people the boredom of patience is intolerable and yet without it lasting results rarely, if ever, emerge. I knew once a very brilliant man, who achieved great success in all the exams he entered for. But when these came to an end very little followed. He lacked the character to endure boredom and those who are afraid of boredom are as little or less likely to achieve lasting success with their great natural talents than their less talented friends and acquaintances.
Even genius benefits from perseverance as Sir Joshua Reynolds once wrote. 'If you have great talents industry will improve them, if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency'. We often secretly envy, the brilliant, but forget that they are also challenged by boredom.
What counts in the building of character or in the achieving of important results is patient endurance, which achieves by God's grace, all things. The hectic world we live in needs this message, perhaps above all else.