Patience

Mrs George MacDonald in a letter to her children:

Don't get weary of forbearing each other and patiently loving.  I feel that Love wants patience more perhaps than anything - to keep it alive and flowering - to water its roots too.  It won't grow without it.  For even our dearest don't always fit into our notions of what we thought they would do, look or speak.  

pg 441 of George MacDonald and His Wife, by Greville MacDonald

Patience...

We’ll continue to practice faithful presence even when the numbers don’t add up, to be good friends even when fear of the unknown threatens to swallow us whole, to be joyful though we’ve “considered all the facts.”  It’s not about a heroic effort to save a neighborhood; rather, I hope it’s about becoming a community of people who can hold our hands open to the promises of radical hope and perceive signposts of success that portend the mysteries of eternity — and I’ll take that work with a heaping side of patience, please.

Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
"A side of patience" in catapult magazine