Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the Lord comes. See how the farmer, in the hope of the precious fruits of the earth, waits patiently for the early and late rains.4 It is necessary to know how to wait and to struggle with patience until the Lord comes.
It is necessary to know how to wait and to struggle with patient perseverance, convinced that with our interest we please God. St. Francis de Sales used to say: "It is necessary to suffer with patience the delays in our perfection, always doing what we can to advance and with good courage. Let us wait with patience, and instead of worrying because we have done so little in the past, let us try diligently to do more in the future ".
Moreover, the acquisition of a virtue is not achieved, ordinarily, with violent sporadic efforts, but with the continuity of the struggle, the constancy of trying every day, every week, aided by grace. "In the battles of the soul, the strategy is often a matter of time, of applying the appropriate remedy, with patience, with stubbornness. Increase the acts of hope. I remind you that you will suffer defeats, or that you will go through ups and downs - God grant that they may be imperceptible - in your interior life, because no one is free from these mishaps. But the Lord, who is omnipotent and merciful, has granted us the suitable means to overcome. It is enough for us to use them (...) with the resolution to begin and to recommend and to begin again at every moment, if necessary ".
The soul of constancy is love; only through love can one be patient and struggle, without accepting defects and failures as something inevitable and without remedy. We cannot be like those Christians who, after many battles and fights, "ran out of strength and lacked courage" when they were already "two steps away from the fountain of living water ".
To be patient with oneself in uprooting bad tendencies and defects of character, means at the same time to flee from conformism and to accept to present oneself many times before the Lord as that servant who had nothing to pay9 , with humility, asking for new graces. In our journey towards the Lord, we will suffer many defeats; many of them will not be important; others will be, but atonement and contrition will bring us even closer to God. This sorrow and repentance for our sins and shortcomings are not sad, because they are sorrow and tears of love. It is the sorrow of not returning as much love as the Lord deserves, the sorrow of returning evil for good to the one who loves us so much.
Hablar con Dios