It is necessary to know how to wait and to fight with patient perseverance, convinced that our interest is pleasing to God. "We must suffer with patience," said Saint Francis de Sales, "the delays in our perfection, always doing what we can to advance and with good spirits. Let us wait with patience, and instead of worrying about having done so little in the past, let us diligently strive to do more in the future."
Furthermore, the acquisition of a virtue is not usually achieved through violent, sporadic efforts, but through the continuity of the struggle—the constancy of trying every day, every week, aided by grace. "In the battles of the soul, strategy is often a matter of time, of applying the appropriate remedy with patience and stubbornness. Increase your acts of hope. I remind you that you will suffer defeats, or that you will go through ups and downs—God grant they be imperceptible—in your interior life, because no one is free from such mishaps. But the Lord, who is omnipotent and merciful, has granted us the ideal means to conquer. It is enough that we use them (...) with the resolution to begin and begin again at every moment, if necessary."
The soul of constancy is love; only through love can one be patient and fight, without accepting defects and failures as something inevitable and without remedy. We cannot be like those Christians who, after many battles and fights, "lost their strength and their courage failed them" when they were already "two steps away from the fountain of living water."
To be patient with oneself when uprooting bad tendencies and character flaws means both fleeing from conformism and accepting that one must often present oneself before the Lord like that servant who had nothing with which to pay, with humility, asking for new graces. On our journey toward the Lord, we will suffer many defeats; many of them will be of no importance; 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 the sorrow and tears of love. It is the regret of not returning as much love as the Lord deserves, the pain of returning evil for good to the One who loves us so much.
HCD