The Long Patience

He has said the name at the same time every morning for nineteen years, and lately he has begun to hear it differently.

It used to be an appeal. In the early years it was practically an argument; he would bring reasons, he would remind God of things, he would occasionally, in the difficult period around the fifth year, negotiate.

Then it settled into something steadier and better for about a decade. He would say the name, and ask, and get on with the day, and it did not cost him much and he did not think about it after nine in the morning.

What has changed in the last two years is that he has started to hear an answer in the silence, and the answer he hears is no.

Not a cruel no. Nabeel is a fair-minded man and he does not think God is being unkind. He thinks he has been told, in the way that God tells people things, which is by not doing them, and that a man who keeps asking after nineteen years of a clear pattern is not being faithful, he is being slow to understand.

So the mornings have become strange. He still says the name. He says it out of a kind of loyalty now, and afterward he feels foolish, and the sitting on this step with the small cup that used to be the best ten minutes of his day has become a thing he does with a knot in it.

His brother is fifty-four and lives four hours away and they speak twice a year and it is warm and it is nothing.

If you have been at it that long and started to hear a refusal, here is the question. Which verse told you that a delay was an answer?

Peter names the reason for the delay

Peter is writing to people who were being mocked for the length of a wait, and his answer is not that the wait is shorter than it looks. He grants the wait. And then he gives its cause.

The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.2 Peter 3:9

Not slack, as some men count slackness. He names the misreading directly: what looks like slowness from the human side is being counted as slackness, and it is not that.

But is longsuffering. The word means long-tempered, slow to bring a matter to its end. And the direction of it is to us-ward, toward people, in their favor.

Not willing that any should perish. And there is the reason for the delay, and it is the opposite of the one Nabeel has constructed. He has read nineteen years of silence as a settled no about his brother. The verse says the length of a delay is caused by God's unwillingness to close the matter.

You have been reading a patience as a refusal, and it is already the opposite thing, and Peter names longsuffering as the cause of exactly this kind of wait. I am not offering a hopeful reading of a hard silence. It is written in 2 Peter 3:9, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a verse about the meaning of delay onto a doorstep at first light.

The one thing this article will not do

And now I want to say something plainly, because a man in his nineteenth year deserves to be told what he is not being promised.

Nobody here is going to tell Nabeel that his brother will come. Not this year, not eventually, not in a way that implies it. Anybody who tells you that has made a promise God did not authorize them to make, and if it does not happen they have handed you a second grief on top of the first.

What can be said, and what is being said, is about the character of the delay, and about who is responsible for the outcome, and neither of those is a prediction.

You are not being handed a guarantee, and the outcome is already in hands that are not yours, and that is the actual comfort rather than a lesser version of it. Scripture says the Lord is longsuffering, not willing that any should perish, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man steady in a wait without ever asking him to hold a promise nobody made.

Whose brother he is

And here is the thing that should change the ten minutes on that step, because there is a load Nabeel has been carrying that was never assigned to him.

He speaks as though his brother's soul is an outcome he has been failing to produce for nineteen years. That is the knot. It is not really about God's answer; it is that he has cast himself as the one whose prayers are supposed to accomplish something and who has not accomplished it.

But the verse puts the unwillingness that any should perish in God, not in Nabeel. His brother is on God's heart before he is on Nabeel's, and has been for fifty-four years, and every single one of those years God has been longsuffering toward him.

Which makes Nabeel's ten minutes something other than a lever. It makes it agreement. He is not moving God toward his brother. He is standing beside God, who is already turned that way.

You are standing with somebody who is already turned toward him, and the willing is already His, and your morning was never the mechanism. It is written that He is not willing that any should perish, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at work in a man four hours away for fifty-four years without needing his brother's help.