Christian Living

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Larry Lilly’s Letter Thursday July 20, 2006

As a young man desiring to become a pastor, I often wondered why ‘patience’ was one of the requirements of the office. After all, as a pastor if folks wouldn’t get with the program, a pastor, clothed with the aura of power from none other than Jesus Christ Himself, could simply relegate the offending parishioner to the regions of the damned and that was the end of it. Please pass the next malcontent.

Certainly I have never sent anyone to the regions of the damned, nor do I have the power to do such a thing, though I do admit to suggesting to a few ‘precious’ souls that it would be fine with me if they were to go there and the sooner the better. This mind set nearly drove my mentors out of their mind, for as one said, “Larry, Larry, Larry, it is alright to think such things but you must never utter them, especially in front of witnesses.
And God forbid that you should ever write such a thing.”

Well, enough about my superior religious instruction and to the matter at hand for today.

Hyman Rickover, an immigrant from Poland, became Admiral Hyman Rickover and is known as the father of the nuclear submarine. He was a converted Jew. He went to the Naval Academy from poverty yet became one of the most outstanding officers of all time serving on active duty for 63 years! All of that to give this quote from this outstanding achiever:

“Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.”

When you accept the truth that in order to communicate Christ to the world that you are dealing not only with the grandest person, the Son of God, but also with ideas that run counter to the accepted ones of any given era, you begin to see the truth of Rickover’s statement and hence the need for patience in the pastoral realm.

The ideas that make up what we call ‘Christian Doctrine’ must as Admiral Rickover said, ‘be driven into practice with courageous patience.’

In the Christian realm these ideas must be talked about and taught in a systematized manner, but they above all the ideas on Earth must be demonstrated in the life lived daily. Demonstrated in the life lived daily is so easy to say or write, the words just roll off the tongue and jump from the keyboard to the page, as near effortlessly as though an angel were forming them. If that was the end of it, life would be so simple.

The acid test of the ideas of the well lived Christian life is in the ‘well lived’ of it.

It is true that as a pastor I need the patience of a saint to endure the faults and foibles of parishioners. It is painfully true that I need the patience of Christ to endure and conquer my own. It takes courageous patience to keep on, considering my own failures.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2006 Use with credit

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