Long Suffering

If part of what makes for "longsuffering" is a sustained period of not fitting, the next question is: what's causing the poor fit? Something is always getting in the way - some dynamic, often a power dynamic, that isn't making room for everyone. That imbalance throws everything off. And unfortunately, most of the time there's no clean way to fix it. It has to be lived through for as long as it lasts.

Once a person is aware of their state of "long-suffering," they can experience a change. Decisions that might have previously been challenging can become clearer, even obvious. This doesn't mean that it's easy, but it does create a kind of principled steadiness that carries people who find themselves in a place in which they do not fit for a long period of time.

Longsuffering does something to a person. We tend to frame longsuffering as something to survive, to "endure until it ends." In many cases, though, the long stretch of it becomes a kind of slow renovation. What was once a posture of resistance or self-reliance quietly gives way to something more open and more honest about one's own limits. The change isn't dramatic from the outside. It accumulates over time. But when you finally look back, you realize that the person who entered the difficulty and the person who came out the other side don't share the same center of gravity. This is longsuffering's reconfiguration.

What would I do anything for if not to get something? Why even act at all? It is in answer to these type of questions that longsuffering does something special, moving us from a system of transaction to a system of grace and faith. The longsufferer learns to take an action simply because they believe in it, even if they do not expect it to relieve whatever is causing the suffering. They are disabused of the notion of "earned outcomes."

The longsufferer is keenly aware of their exhaustion, of their weaknesses, and of the ways they are concerned that they won't be able to endure. At the same time, simply being in the state of longsuffering means you're already enduring, whether that endurance feels active and planned and controlled or like muddling through moment by moment. Where does the strength to "suffer on" come from? Let's take a look at how Daniel is met in a moment of great weakness and given strength not his own to rely upon.

Longsuffering. As an adjective, it simply describes patiently enduring difficult things. Over the course of this series, though, it has hopefully gained nuance, describing a way of living in a context where, for any number of reasons, you don't quite "fit." (And as such, it hopefully has gained the value of being essentially a universal condition.)