Waiting.
I’m not sure about you, but waiting even for a few moments—whether stuck in traffic or standing at the microwave—can be difficult. Our culture today is obsessed with immediacy and “now!”
Simply, as a culture, we don’t have nor want to cultivate “patience.”
The word “patience” in Galatians 5 (the fruits of the Spirit) is makrothymia—a word that entails “endurance, constancy, steadfastness, and perseverance.”
A similar concept is found in James 1:3, but the word used there for “patience” is hypomonē, best defined as “the brave calm and steadfast courage of the Christian soul. It is to be unbreakable and immovable. To remain unmoved, to not recede or flee, to stand fast amidst the most severe misfortunes and trials and to hold fast one’s faith in Christ to the end.”(1)
Both New Testament words assume waiting, endurance, and difficulty.
Tensile Strength
Whenever I think of patience, I always think of tensile strength.
Simply, tensile strength is “the maximum stress that a material can withstand while being stretched or pulled before breaking.”(2)
It’s used for things like rope and chain to measure how much tension it can endure before snapping.
If you decided to start rock climbing, I presume you’d prefer a thick rope, with high tensile strength, over a tiny sewing thread. You’d (obviously) want the rope to be able to hold you in case you fall and not snap in the process.
When you take the idea of tensile strength and bring it into our spiritual lives, the concept could be defined as “How much stress, difficulty, and hardship the human soul can handle before giving way and breaking.”(3)
As Eric Ludy once said:
Tensile Strength + Resilience = Patience
- Tensile Strength – “How much stress, difficulty, and hardship the human soul can handle before giving way and breaking”
- Resilience – “How long the human soul takes to return to its former size and shape after enduring acute stress, difficulty, and hardship” [like a rubber band]
- Patience – “The ability to stay in position”(4)
Patience + Waiting
Do you have patience?
Do you have that mixture of tensile strength and resilience that every Christian life desperately needs?
Do you delight in your waiting?
In today’s entry within Streams in the Desert, Lettie B. Cowman wrote:
WAITING is much more difficult than walking. Waiting requires patience, and patience is a rare virtue. It is fine to know that God builds hedges around His people—when the hedge is looked at from the viewpoint of Protection. But when the hedge is kept around one until it grows so high that he cannot see over the top, and wonders whether he is ever to get out of the little sphere of influence and service in which he is pent up, it is hard for him sometimes to understand why he may not have a larger environment—hard for him to “brighten the corner” where he is. But God has a purpose in all HIS holdups. “The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord,” reads Psalm 37:23.
On the margin of his Bible at this verse, George Mueller had a notation, “And the stops also.” It is a sad mistake for men to break through God’s hedges. It is a vital principle of guidance for a Christian never to move out of the place in which he is sure God has placed him, until the Pillar of Cloud moves.(5)
May we freshly enjoy and embrace the “waiting” seasons God brings into our lives.
Let us allow Him to take the challenges, the waitings, and the uncertainties … and use those to develop greater tensile strength in our souls. Let us be marked by patience, perseverance, endurance, constancy, steadfastness, and longsuffering (makrothymia and hypomonē).
But remember, true godly patience is not something we can merely reach into our pockets and produce in and of ourselves—rather, it IS a fruit of the Spirit, and we need His work and life within us to enable us to fully showcase it (His life) within our lives and to our world.
FOOTNOTES
(1) I’m indebted to my friend Eric Ludy for his definition of hypomonē (taken from his various sermons).
(2) Ultimate tensile strength, Wikipedia (accessed August 16, 2025).
(3) Again, I’m indebted to Eric Ludy and his definition of tensile strength.
(4) Eric Ludy, Hold the Position, given at the Church at Ellerslie on July 7, 2013.
(5) Lettie B. Cowman, Streams in the Desert, August 16 (Los Angeles, CA: The Oriental Missionary Society, 1925), 240.
Photo Credit: Patrick Hendry
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