Teach us, O Lord, the disciplines of patience, for to wait is often harder than to work. — Peter Marshall

Teach us, O Lord, the disciplines of patience, for to wait is often harder than to work.

Author: Peter Marshall

Insight: There's something almost counterintuitive about this: we often see patience as passive, as the thing we do when we're stuck waiting for something. But this quote flips that. Patience isn't laziness or resignation—it's actually a skill that requires discipline, maybe even more effort than staying busy. Think about the times you've felt most frustrated. It's rarely during the work itself. It's the waiting—for results, for someone to change, for circumstances to shift. Our instinct is to fill that time with activity, to feel like we're doing something. But real patience means staying present with uncertainty without frantically trying to escape it. That's genuinely hard work, the kind that happens internally where nobody sees it. What makes this matter now is that we're trained to optimize, to move fast, to see delays as problems to solve. So when patience is actually what's needed—in relationships, in personal growth, in accepting what we can't control—we feel like we're failing. Recognizing patience as a discipline rather than a weakness might help us stop fighting against the waiting itself and actually learn something from it.