Patience has never been my favorite spiritual quality. But today I am beginning to understand the power behind it. Once again, human patience is very different from spiritual patience. The former is a necessary evil. The latter is an expression of spiritual strength.
We are told in Unity, "Never pray for patience!". The theory is that when you pray for patience you are asking for experiences that will teach it to you. You'll end up waiting forever in the area in which you are already frustrated so you can truly learn the quality. So embrace patience yourself as you need to. Don't pray for Divine Intersession to teach you self-control, because the Divine will make sure you master the lesson. Your present state of comfort is inconsequential when a spiritual lesson comes down the pipeline.
However, patience is a quality that comes together for us down the road as we become more and more comfortable in our faith in the invisible Divine forces in our life. Sometimes, just as bread dough must first rise a while before it can be baked, our outer experience must continue to cure a while before our prayers and the invisible forces they have evoked are ready to coalesce into an outer demonstration.
There are those who will tell you that if you must wait, you have failed spiritually. They will explain that your lack of faith kept you waiting. I beg to differ with them. I will suggest that those individuals have made the outer world the ultimate test of all faith in the Invisible. Thus, the outer expression is what is most real to them. And though they may be quite good at demonstrations, they are stuck in one of the way stations on the path and cannot go further until outer demonstration is only a by-product, not the main event. To reach the higher levels you must find your reality in the higher realms, and not be dependent on the physical world around you for your faith.
As I have said many times, "We have had a number of dramatic, miraculous healings in our congregation over the years. And each of these individuals who experienced miraculous healing, knew that God had healed them, long before their body demonstrated the whole truth of their realization." The real-ness was in the inner experience and they were confused as to why their bodies did not show what they knew was real. But they were not dismayed by the slow expression because they KNEW they were healed. The inner healing was the true reality. Thus, they patiently awaited an outer expression that they knew was inevitable because "they were healed" (whether their body showed it yet or not). This is the type of spiritual maturity that the advanced student expresses and we call it patience.
However, "waiting on the invisible" to show final results can be quite a challenge. We must know what we have seen spiritually, while the earth acts like nothing of the kind has ever happened. We must chase away the doubt that our human personality throws up on a regular basis. And we must ignore the fact that sometimes the outer world gets worse before it gets better. This all requires a "steadfastness" to our vision of the invisible - a talent that is hard won. It surfaces through a long series of successes and even more importantly, failures. Nothing teaches you patience more than doubting your vision, heading the other direction, only to discover that had you held on, your faith would have prevailed. Of course, learning when to hang on and when to realize that Spirit is urging you toward another direction is it's own series of lessons.
The important thing is that patiently "waiting on the invisible" because you KNOW the invisible is already in motion and nothing can stop it, is one of the qualities that makes you a truly powerful spiritual being. Set your prayers in motion. Feel the higher spiritual forces responding. KNOW what has been created in the Invisible Realm that is much more real than what we face out here. And patiently, with an optimistic almost child-like expectation, wait to see the piece of physical art that the Invisible Reality will create as its expression - and what exact form it will take. The waiting weighs on our human self, but is effortless for the spirit within us. Step by step we are placing more and more identity emphasis on this latter portion of our being.
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