I love the verse from James 1:2-4. I will paraphrase and recite it this way: “Count it all joy my brothers when you encounter tests and trials, knowing that the trying of your faith builds patience. Therefore let patience have her perfect work so that you will be complete and entire wanting nothing.”

I love that verse because it speaks to patience in the face of difficulty. But my take on it is not that patience means to sit and wait out whatever is your current difficulty. The patience it talks about is more about what you do while you wait.

Man is a creature designed to overcome and as such we need to be about the business of overcoming. We are to count it joy because it is one more chance for us to use that muscle we call our minds to overcome an obstacle. The kind of overcoming that looks out into the distance and sees where we want to be even if that place does not currently exist. The kind of overcoming that forces us to use our faith to get us over the next hill. The kind of overcoming that says “GET UP and just start walking… you may not know where you are going but just start!”

I say that because “faith is the bird that flies through the darkness toward the sun, before he sees the dawn.”

And so I will close as I began: Count it all joy my brothers when you encounter tests and trials, knowing that the trying of your faith builds patience…