Patience
November 6 , 2005
Luke 18:1-8
James 5:7-11
Patience was one of my least favorite Biblical topics while I was growing up. Instead of being used as it is intended it became synonymous in my life with “just wait.” It was always used as “something I needed to groom” in order to conquer boredom, patience or rather waiting. It was always used as an excuse to avoid action for the practice of waiting was more important and much more safe. It was often used to suck potential from every day, challenge and opportunity. And, I can tell you, when you have a child like myself in the family, who was questioning everything from sun up to down, constantly interpreting things differently than the family, a mother’s love encourages one to wait, that all might not be lost. It was a fear-based patience meaning wait hoping never would be the end result.
As I grew I realized that waiting isn’t synonymous with patience. In fact waiting is only part of the definition:
Patience
1: The ability to endure waiting or delay without becoming annoyed or upset
To persevere calmly when faced with difficulty
Patience
2: The ability to tolerate trying circumstances
The ability to tolerate being hurt, provoked, or annoyed without complaint or loss of temper
Patience is not just waiting. It is waiting that is linked to an emotive experience. When life is difficult, annoying, upsetting we endure the waiting. We tolerate trying circumstances without complaint or losing our temper. We do this that we might instead use that emotive power, that anger at difficulty, frustration with those systemic problems that force delay, we might use the energy of the emotive response to begin changing the living when the difficulty has ended. When provocation is at bay.
A good story.
She was the 20th child of a sharecropping family, the granddaughter of slaves. She was born on October 6, 1917 in rural Montgomery County Mississippi. By the time she was two, her family moved to Sunflower County and began their work of sharecropping. By the age of six she was in the fields picking cotton and by the age of 12 she had to drop out of school and work in the fields full time. When she was 27 years old the plantation owners discovered she could read and write and she was allowed to become time and record keeper. By 28 she married Perry who was a tractor driver on the farm. They made their home in Ruleville and worked as sharecroppers and plantation record keeper for the next 18 years. Sharecroppers usually are born poor, live poor, and die poor.
And then something different happened. In 1962 the Civil Rights Movement or the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party came to Ruleville. And, she decided to go to one of their meetings. She became involved and then trained in all that SNCC, the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had to offer. She quickly realized that lack of access to the political process was a direct link to poverty and she was steeled in her patience in that moment. That she would endure all that was happening to her in this small difficulty to bring about a new and wider world for all of the people, including hers. In 1963 she attempted to register to vote, but was unsuccessful due to the infamous “literacy” tests put in place to prevent blacks from voting. By just attempting to register she was fired from her job, she began receiving phone threats and the safe house that she fled to was fired at by gunmen 26 times. It was then she became a field secretary for SNCC and successfully registered to vote.
Around this time she is quoted as saying, “I do remember, one time, a man came to me after the students began to work in Mississippi, and he said the white people were getting tired and they were getting tense and anything might happen. Well, I asked him, 'how long he thinks we had been getting tired?' … All my life I’ve been sick and tired. Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.
“Sometimes it seems to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.”
On the trip back home, when the bus stopped to discharge and pick up passengers, members of the group challenged the by-then illegal segregation of restaurants and bathrooms at interstate bus terminals. In Winona, Mississippi, she and the other SNCC leaders were arrested by local police, taken to jail, and several of them, including her, were beaten with deathly fervor. Two local black prisoners had been forced by the sheriff to hit her with a leather-covered club until she was bloody, scarred, and nearly unconscious. And they left her there lying on the jailhouse floor listening to the screams of the woman who was then beaten in the cell next to hers and the discussion about throwing them into the river never to be seen again.
The SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference pressured Winona leaders who released the prisoners into their care. And as she left the jail house beaten badly, damaged kidney, swollen lips, deeply wounded she stopped in front of the sheriff’s wife. Quietly, without bitterness, and with great compassion, she reminded this church-going white woman of a familiar text from the New Testament, “God has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on the face of the earth.” She believed that the light of freedom was for all sisters and brothers. And, she was encouraging this woman to know it, act on it, and let her light shine. Then and only then will we discover the great power of the universe together all over the south, the north, the world, Let it shine, let it shine let it shine.
In fact she and other song leaders in the movement used music as transformative, healing resources. And she was known to use this tool better than anyone else. Her favorite was This little Light of Mine. This use of music inspired the community to move together into danger with a faith that they and their cause were just and healing. She has provided a history that helps us to understand the choices made by so many black men and women of her generation, who, unwilling, left the South they grew up in, and somehow found the courage to join a movement in which they risked everything.
Her name was Fannie Lou Hamer. Fannie Lou Hamer knew the art of patience. Of being able to endure waiting without becoming annoyed or upset. She persevered calmly when faced with difficulty. And it did not matter the circumstances nor how trying they were she would not lose her temper she merely tolerated being hurt, provoked and annoyed without complaint. She did this out of patience that propelled her to use her anger, hurt and difficulty to change the voting laws in Mississippi, within the Democratic Party. Fannie Lou Hamer is one of many who came to the unjust judge time and time again in order to find justice. Patience didn’t make her wait for another day, it helped her seize her opportunities.
It is easy enough for us to point fingers at the unjust judges in our lives. And, we enjoy complaining and whining about them. But, what if we quit the complaining and the whining and we used that emotion that is generated when get smacked into injustice. What if we use that anger, that fear, that frustration to fuel our patience and a plan. A plan that takes into consideration how it is this injustice might be worn down. How we might within our own means be able to send emails, write letters, make phone calls, stage a protest, paint a picture, draw a cartoon, how we might use our gifts and patience to bring about the truths of injustice. What if this were the day we all decided we were just sick and tired of being sick and tired and we decided to fall forward in the fight for freedom?
That would be some sort of patience! That would be some sort of light.