Endurance

It is hard to tell someone in extraordinary circumstances to wait.  No matter how strong you are, waiting and enduring doesn’t come naturally.  If someone was to tell me to “‘hang on.  Within one year—I'll sign a contract on it!—the arrogant brutality of Kedar, those hooligans of the desert, will be over, nothing much left of the Kedar toughs.’  The God of Israel says so.”  (Isaiah 21.16)  I would wonder if one of us was crazy, at the very least.
 
Life today teaches us to be impatient.  Everything is measured in the short term.  Looking beyond the immediate is often considered as old fashion, ignorant, or pointless.  Results, gratification, and enduring come in very short cycles – often measured in minutes and hours, rarely weeks or months, and never in terms of years or decades.  Nobody waits anymore!  Or so the story goes.
 
I would like to suggest a radical approach.  If you really wan to discover everything in the short-term – things like true satisfaction, peace, and the illusive happiness factor – then you have to partner with Divinity and go for the long term.  Anything less gives you less.  The key to life lies beyond yourself, what goes next, and winning by the world’s measures. 
 
The option is simple yet complex, easy yet extremely difficult.  We can live and be in the moment in partnership with God.  Divinity offers us the chance to be god to those around us in our community.  We are God’s representative in the moment.  We can be hands, feet, eyes, ears, and most of all heart for God.  I find the best, more, and greatest things in life are found in community, the present, and in being engaged.  It is easy yet the complexity comes in the challenge of enduring.
 
Endurance is standing tall and accepting others unconditionally while you are rejected.
Endurance is reaching out, sharing whatever you have, while you go hungry.
Endurance is always seeing life through community, letting go of the need to satisfy an urge or whim.
 
Life offers great rewards; they come with endurance.