Endurance in Face of Discord
Beloved seeker after divine strengths in God’s truth, let us direct our gaze toward another important virtue ever fortifying the soldier in Christ: Patience. Spiritual warfare is impossible with a sensitive and bruised noggin, Patience serves as a helmet, protecting the mind from the relentless assaults of discord and delay.
The Nature of Patience
Patience is the virtue that accepts delays due to differences, founded upon the recognition that spiritual progress unfolds at the necessary pace, imperceptible to the hurried eye. This is a motto of many therapists, that any progress remains progress, and there is much in this to agree with.
Structural Virtues Theory SVT elucidates Patience as the “acceptance of delays,” 6 in division of the full 12. Active endurance over passive acceptance, and it is acceptance of nothing besides surmountable differences, acknowledgement that timing the divine must diverge from our impatient expectations, if we ever expect to learn anything.
Conservation: Retention of Excellence
Next we have Conservation, virtue retaining excellence through disciplined repetition in the value inculcated by activated Patience. While Patience accepts delays, Conservation ensures that interim periods are not squandered but harnessed for spiritual growth, recuperating all things learned in Honesty, Propriety, and Awareness further down the line of Perseverance and Analysis through Morality and Spirit, for use by those final five: Prudence, Ethics, Justice, Courage, and Willpower. It is the alchemy transforming the awaiting act into opportunities for refinement.
In virtues, Conservation and Patience are intricately linked, forming a dyad where one complements the other, a harmonious balance between acceptance and active engagement for change. Conservation then is the padding of Patience’s helmet, often overlooked, but quintessential to its regular use. The soldier in Christ, armed with this duo, navigates life’s uncertainties with grace and fortitude, protecting their mind from the tribulations faced in the world.
He who endures to the end will be saved. I exhort you to active perseverance, relentless pursuit of spiritual truth amidst life’s storms. Nobody’s life is perfect, that was never actually the point of this all. We must not waste the breath of God. Patience and Conservation equates to trust in adversity. It is the soldier’s unyielding spirit refusing to falter, even when the path ahead seems shrouded in darkness.
The Link Between Patience and Prudence
SVT underscores the link between Patience and Prudence, positing them as essential components of virtue continuance and progression deeper into the RS (Resurrexit Spiritus) domain of Logos, and encompassing all things. Prudence guides action with wisdom, while Patience sustains us through inevitable delays and setbacks. Conservation provides the enabling cushioning here, the flexibility in the middle, the never-ending desire to avoid waste of the highest order. The dyad becomes triad in a fortress of resilience that withstands life’s vicissitudes, and enables the higher Ethics.
The Path of Endurance
Patience is daily surrender to divine timing. It is the soldier’s steadfast resolve to endure, persevere, remaining faithful, and allowing for the unexpected, when the horizon seems obscured. In cultivating Patience, we rise in our alignment in elevational motive, a narrative above the mere fleshly concerned with the spirit, virtues being our highest value internally maintained and sown through love. It is in this endurance that we find these truest strengths, fortitude of crucible tempered by adversity into an unconquerable creature of God’s purpose. Beloved, don your armour. Lower this helmet upon your sensitive temples, like a crown.