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Patience is one of man's greatest virtues
R.J. Funkhauser
Thursday, August 25, 1955
Patience is one of man's greatest virtues . . .perhaps the greatest. When I think of patience I think of such illustrations as these:
Patience is the boy Abraham Lincoln. He is sitting on an adze-hewn floor, in front of an open fire at midnight. The lanky boy has a piece of pine board on which he is writing and cyphering with a chunk of charcoal from the fireplace. Tom Lincoln, Abe's father, who had failed in life for the reasons that he had wandered from place to place, awoke and called, "Abe, why don't go to bed?" The result of that boy's patience - a reunited nation: the Gettysburg Address.
A crude, but true and simple illustration of Patience and Impatience could be the following:
It is dark. Two men pass through a strange land, thick with brier, bramble and thorn. One man travels in the same general direction. He carefully avoids the natural handicaps that beset the path he takes. Of the two men, he travels the shorter distance and ends his journey with fewer wounds. The impatient man has to cover more ground to reach the same destination. He impatiently turns, first to the right and then to the left. In his impatient flight, running hither and yon, he encounters more thistle and thorn, and ends the journey bleeding and wounded. Such, my friends, is the journey through life.
One last illustration:
Two men read a great book through. The patient man reads slowly without skipping. That gives him time out for thought and meditation on what he has read. The impatient man hurries over the chapters that are not interesting to him. In these chapters are hidden some of the fine gems of thought which the patient man discovered, and the other man missed. In our journey through life we cannot skim-read from the full chapter and know the whole story.
May I now turn to my greatest source of information - the Bible - for proof of the reward Patience.
"Ye have heard of the patience of Job," (New Testament: James, v. 11)
Job was so perfect that the Lord said of him, "there is none like him in the earth." His wealth made him "the greatest of all of the men of the east." It was all taken away and he lay afflicted in a ditch. He had lost all but one thing -- Patience. For that, "The Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning."
Yes, Patience might be the greatest virtue that man possesses.
Source:www.libraries.wvu.edu/funkhouser/1955sz.html#82555
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