One of the most clarifying moments in my conversation with Paul Dafydd Jones came when he did something both simple and, in its way, revolutionary. He flipped the script on patience.
We ordinarily think of patience as a human virtue. We tell children to be patient. We commend patients, patients with difficult people, patience in suffering, patience in traffic, patience in marriage, patience in church committees, patience in politics if we have any left to spare. In common usage, patience is what one person exercises toward another person who is proving inconvenient.
But Paul insisted that this is not the right starting point.
Before patience is something we ask of human beings, it is something we must ask about God. Before patience is a moral achievement, it is a theological reality. Before we decide what it means for us to endure, forebear, wait, or persevere, we have to ask what it means to say that God is patient.
That is not just an adjustment of emphasis. It is a change in orientation.
It means patience is not first about temperament. It is about the character of ultimate reality.
That struck me because it moves patience out of the realm of mere manners and into the heart of theology. It also rescues the subject from sentimentality. If patience begins with God, then patience is not merely “being nice,” not merely suppressing irritation, not merely gritting one’s teeth while pretending to be virtuous. It is bound up with creation, providence, judgment, mercy, time, freedom, and the strange fact that God does not seem to move at the speed we would prefer.
Paul pointed to Exodus 34, where God is described as merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. That phrase—slow to anger—contains more than we often hear in it. It means God does not fly off the handle. It means God forbears. It means God gives time and space for repentance, for recognition, for return, for transformation. It means that divine power is not impulsive power. It means that judgment is not absent, but delayed, held, suspended within mercy.
And here is where Paul’s view of divine patience becomes especially distinctive. He did not describe God’s patience as mere passivity, as though God were simply sitting back, uninvolved, watching history roll by. Nor did he reduce it to a pious way of restating the problem of evil. Rather, he described a God who is both active and permissive, sovereign and forbearing. God guides history, yet does not constantly swoop in to interrupt every human act of rebellion, cruelty, stupidity, or self-destruction. God “lets be,” to use Paul’s phrase, without ceasing to be God.
That is unsettling. It should be.
Because once you say that God is patient, you are also saying that God is willing, for a time, to allow realities to unfold that He does not endorse. He allows sin to gather momentum. He allows generations to feel the consequences of what prior generations have set in motion. He gives room—not because evil is good, but because coercive interruption is not the only mode of divine rule.
That is a harder doctrine than many of us want. We would prefer either constant intervention or total distance. But divine patience, at least as Paul opened it up, is something more demanding. God is near, yet not controlling history like a puppet master. God is sovereign, yet not frantic. God is opposed to evil, yet not panicked by time.
And perhaps that is what is hardest for us to bear: not simply that God judges, but that He waits.
1. Mature faith does not fear bewilderment
From that starting point, another thread in our conversation took on greater clarity. Paul spoke of theology in the old phrase: faith seeking understanding. That phrase matters because it stands against both sterile rationalism and blind religiosity.
Paul did not come to theology through a conventional religious upbringing. In fact, he emphasized that he had an entirely secular background and, in retrospect, was grateful for it. He suggested that skepticism and questioning were not enemies of mature faith, but part of the path by which faith can expand rather than calcify.
I found that significant.
Too often, Christians treat questions as threats, confusion as failure, and complexity as compromise. But if patience begins with God, then perhaps one implication is that faith itself must become patient enough to endure bewilderment. Not all understanding arrives at once. Not every doctrine can be handled in childhood form forever. At some point, milk must give way to stronger food.
Paul even said he wants his students to leave a course a little bewildered, a little confused, a little disturbed. That is not pedagogical cruelty. It is respect for reality. It is an acknowledgment that maturation often feels less like triumph and more like the loss of easy certainties.
This resonated with my own long wrestling with scripture, doctrine, and the difference between inherited formulations and lived understanding. A faith that cannot survive questions is not faith. It is dependency masquerading as conviction.
2. Grace has a tempo
One of the most beautiful turns in the conversation came through Paul’s discussion of Julian of Norwich. Her insight, as he described it, is that God accommodates divine action to human frailty. God’s grace does not simply steamroll us. It meets us at a pace we can bear.
That is a profound refinement of what patience means.
It means divine patience is not indifference and not delay for delay’s sake. It is care. It is God’s willingness to move at the speed of actual human development rather than at the speed of abstract perfection. Individuals, cultures, and societies can only learn at certain tempos. One part of grace is that God condescends, gently, to that pace.
I find this extraordinarily illuminating.
It helps explain why transformation is so often slower than we want—personally, relationally, culturally, historically. It helps explain why the kingdom does not arrive on our timetable, why healing may come by inches, why social progress can lurch, why repentance can be uneven, and why the educational process of the soul often feels less like a sprint than like an agonizing walk through fog.
We live in a world of acceleration, optimization, notifications, and reaction. We have built systems that train us to expect immediacy and to resent delay. So divine patience can feel, to modern people especially, like negligence. But if Julian and Paul are right, what feels to us like slowness may in fact be mercy. God is not late. He is patient with creatures who break under too much too fast.
3. Polarization is failed pluralism
This theological account of patience has public consequences, and Paul was especially strong here.
He made the point that the world is not going to become less pluralistic. Religious diversity will not disappear. Political diversity will not disappear. Cultural and social forms of difference will not disappear. If anything, they will intensify. The problem, then, is not pluralism itself. The problem is our inability to live with it.
That is a crucial distinction.
Polarization, on this account, is what happens when we do not know how to handle pluralism. When otherness is viewed first as threat rather than as part of the givenness of creation, we retreat into a defensive crouch. We tighten around our tribe, our ideology, our litmus tests, our preferred language, our own little golden calf. Then, predictably, everyone else begins to behave like an enemy because we have already cast them in that role.
Paul was careful not to collapse pluralism into relativism. He did not say we surrender judgment. On the contrary, he explicitly said that one may still identify lies, dehumanization, and moral wrong. But one can do so without treating every person who differs from us as irredeemable.
That distinction requires patience.
It requires the patience to remain in relation without immediate demonization. The patience to hear before reacting. The patience to distinguish actual evil from mere difference. The patience to allow “complicated forms of joy,” as Paul put it, to emerge from difference held together rather than annihilated.
In that sense, patience is not merely private virtue. It is civic equipment.
4. There is such a thing as holy impatience
Yet one of the wisest things Paul said was that patience is not always the whole answer.
There are times when impatience is right.
Impatience with inequity.
Impatience with injustice.
Impatience with dehumanization.
Impatience with systems that grind people down while congratulating themselves for efficiency.
That matters because patience can be abused. It can be preached downward. It can become a weapon used by the comfortable against the afflicted: wait your turn, endure quietly, don’t make trouble, be patient while we continue benefiting from the arrangement. Paul clearly understands this danger. Divine patience is not a sanctification of oppression. It is not a command to the wounded to become infinitely accommodating to what destroys them.
And yet even here, he made a subtle but important point: to express impatience well requires patience too. One must discern timing, method, proportion, and form. Resistance itself must be thoughtful if it is to be fruitful. Otherwise impatience collapses into mere reactivity, and reaction rarely heals what it opposes.
That tension seems right to me. We need enough patience not to become hysterical, and enough impatience not to become complacent.
5. Patience may be one of the deepest forms of responsible adulthood
Late in the conversation, Paul said something that stayed with me. He suggested that religious studies and theology, at their best, are training grounds for responsible adulthood. That may sound utilitarian at first, but I think he meant something deeper. Learning to navigate profound differences without collapsing into caricature, panic, or hostility is part of what it means to become fully human.
That is not only an academic point. It is spiritual formation.
To inhabit ambiguity without surrendering truth.
To remain in conversation without forfeiting conviction.
To move slowly enough to think.
To resist what must be resisted without becoming consumed by rage.
To let faith seek understanding rather than settle for slogans.
To endure a future whose details remain hidden.
All of that belongs to patience.
And if patience begins with God, then our task is not simply to imitate an abstract quality. It is to become, however partially, creatures capable of living inside God’s tempo.
That may be one of the hardest disciplines in the modern world.
Because we are being trained every day in the opposite direction: toward immediacy, outrage, notification, acceleration, suspicion, tribalism, and perpetual reaction. We are becoming short-fused, collectively, without even noticing it. We do not know how to pause. We do not know how to wait. We do not know how to think slowly enough to judge wisely. We do not know how to stay in relation long enough for truth to ripen.
So perhaps Paul’s reversal is exactly what we need.
Patience is not first what we demand of ourselves or others. It is something we discern in the being and action of God. And only then, under that light, can we begin to ask what patience might mean for us.
Not passivity.
Not cowardice.
Not surrender.
But a deeper strength: the capacity to endure time truthfully, to bear complexity without panic, to remain open without becoming formless, and to know when love requires waiting and when justice requires refusing to wait any longer.
That seems to me no small theological achievement.
And because these conversations belong to a larger unfolding inquiry, I want to invite you to stay with me for what is coming next on Created in the Image of God.
On Sunday, August 30 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time, I’ll be speaking with Michael Ward—theologian, literary scholar, and one of the leading experts on C.S. Lewis. We’ll explore the imagination, theology, and hidden depths of Lewis’s work, and why his stories continue to resonate with readers today. From The Chronicles of Narnia to the larger cosmos of Lewis’s thought, it promises to be a rich conversation about how literature can illuminate faith in unexpected ways.
Then on Tuesday, September 1 at 8:00 p.m. Central time, I’ll be joined by Kelly Edmiston—pastor, author, and speaker—for a conversation about how Christians can move beyond shame and silence and create more honest conversations around faith, identity, and sexuality. We’ll talk about long-held expectations, the burdens they create, and the greater freedom, healing, and wholeness that grace makes possible.
If this conversation with Paul stirred something in you—about time, patience, pluralism, judgment, maturity, or the possibility that God’s slowness may be something other than absence—I think these next two conversations will continue that same journey from different angles. One turns toward imagination and the literary life of faith. The other toward honesty, grace, and the difficult work of freedom.
Both belong to the same long road.
