Patience

Patience is the capacity of enduring hardship or inconvenience. To have patience (with somebody or something) is the ability to stay calm and accept a delay or something annoying without complaining.The Oxford English Dictionary

Patience emphasizes calmness, self-control, and the willingness or ability to tolerate delay. Its opposite is weakness. To have patience is the ability to stay calm and accept a delay or something annoying without complaining; the ability to spend a lot of time doing something difficult that needs a lot of attention and effort.


“Never work for patience or you’ll attract ten million things that require patience.”—Edna Lister


Patience is a state of being that includes everything that God is.—Edna Lister —Your expression of patience is based on the height, breadth, and depth of your faith and love of God. Use His patience to invoke the outpouring of the principle of nonresistance. Let your sense of humor give you balance, perspective, poise and patience.







Edna Lister on Patience

If you work to develop patience, it brings you more occasions and places in which to develop it.—Edna Lister, Patience and Forgiveness, April 15, 1934.


It’s better to be humbly patient and say, "Of myself, I do nothing. I work to make myself technically perfect, then turn myself over for God to o’ershadow and use."—Edna Lister, March 9, 1939.


Do not say, "Have patience," but work to perfect your ability to praise. Patience is the outer expression of praise.—Edna Lister, May 7, 1939.


When you live to the soul’s heights, patience and peace then move into action, compassionate and fulfilling.—Edna Lister, March 3, 1940.


Live high, agreeing with the Light at the place of poise, then you will express the necessary patience in peace.—Edna Lister, August 9, 1940.


Peace and Patience are the offspring of Poise and Power.—Edna Lister, February 13, 1941.


The more you struggle, strive, battle and work for patience, the longer you wait. Move up in consciousness to your high place of poise, open yourself to that great River of Life, and let unlimited Power flow smoothly, quietly, silently flow through and from you. For this is the only time when it can do God’s perfect work, bringing His perfect results. Let God work as you.—Edna Lister, August 27, 1941.


Without patience, you cannot know peace.—Edna Lister, The Two-Edged Sword, April 19, 1942.


Never work for patience or you’ll attract ten million things that require patience. Move up in consciousness into the high place, the tower room, the sanctuary to live as poise, and peace will express itself as you on the outer.—Edna Lister, June 5, 1944.


Do not work for patience, but for Power and poise. Patience operates up to the brow center, but Power and poise work at the crown of your head.—Edna Lister, November 26, 1951.


Ascend into poise, peace, serenity, and patience. Stand where poise is and you will need no peace or patience; you will have become law.—Edna Lister, Gifts and Giving, June 14, 1953.


If you pray for patience, you attract worse chaos to be patient about. Pray for poise, yoked to its bedfellow, Power.—Edna Lister, July 16, 1953.


The subconscious makes you work to learn peace and patience.—Edna Lister, I Surrender, July 4, 1954.


You can’t gain patience by thinking about it.—Edna Lister, Jesus, the Teacher, October 3, 1954.


To spend time just working for peace and patience is quite futile. The harder you work for them, the more things enter your life to call for peace and patience. It becomes a regular merry-go-round to see which will win, patience or impatience. Holding peace and patience as your goal only invites life to send more situations requiring patience.—Edna Lister, Eternal Youth, 1956


Compassion is a trinity of peace, patience and love.—Edna Lister, December 18, 1958.


The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.—Galatians 5:22-23. Longsuffering is patience, which is endurance in strength. Universal patience waits upon the Lord for fulfillment. No patience is the opposite of impatience. Work for acceptance and endurance of delays as being perfect, but include that beautiful giving of self in seeing God as invisible and loving.—Edna Lister, Idealization, May 10, 1959.


Lift the idea that you are being patient. Patience, when applied to the self, is no virtue, but a term of self‑exaltation. Climb into soul consciousness, where poise is receptive to full Power, to redouble your expression of perfect peace and patience. Peace is always satisfied with what is presented for lifting. Patience is comprehensive, all-encompassing mothering love acting with no thought of self. Move up in consciousness, into poise, to lift all negative things of each virtue to become one with poise.—Edna Lister, October 12, 1960.


Do not work for patience, but for compassion.—Edna Lister, July 19, 1961.


Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.—Revelation 3:10. To live in the Light, to ascend in consciousness, is to keep the word of patience. This sacrifice of self lifts you above your temptations and initiations.—Edna Lister, The Seven Churches, October 3, 1961.


Working for patience, instead of poise, causes life to challenge your patience about a thousand times a day.—Edna Lister, April 4, 1963.


If you pray for patience, you attract worse chaos. Pray for poise, yoked to its bedfellow, Power.—Edna Lister, July 16, 1963.


Say, I love thee to what irks you the most. These words carry the Power of the Almighty.—Edna Lister, December 16, 1964.


Patience represents the inexhaustible eternities of God expressing, and nobody can stop the Eternal from expressing.—Edna Lister, May 25, 1965.


If you are busy or perhaps in prayer and the telephone rings, the sound cannot ripple the mirror surface of your mind, if you are the boss of your consciousness. Instead of losing patience, you remain serene, high in consciousness and encourage others to also.—Edna Lister, Your Life, Detriment or Glory, June 5, 1965.


My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.—James 1:2-4. If you surrender, the Light of God uses you, and goes before you. People may be ugly when the Light is using you to illumine their subconscious. They hand you what they are, not what they are not. Light shows up darkness, but if you think you are the Light, no Light uses you.
  The principle of nonresistance is to agree with any adversary. This is patience, but if you let others know you are being patient, you show contempt. Patience is the expression of nonresistance in its three virtues: to stand, to endure, to hold. You don’t compare yourself to the other fellow’s inadequacies, but let the need to be patient haunt you.
  You become patient not by working for it but by standing, enduring, and holding. If you ask for patience, you will face all sorts of needs to be patient. Use patience to invoke the outpouring of the principle of nonresistance. Patience is a state of being that includes everything that God is.—Edna Lister, Am I Strong to Endure? December 18, 1966.


You become patience and serenity through coordination among the nerves of brain, emotions and mental life. Everything that comes to me is to increase my patience.—Edna Lister, October 19, 1967.

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New Testament on Patience

In your patience possess ye your souls.—Luke 21:19.


Warn them that are unruly, comfort the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men.—1 Thessalonians 5:14.


And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves—2 Timothy 2:24-25.


That ye be not slothful, but followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises. For when God made promise to Abraham, because he could swear by no greater, he sware by himself, saying, Surely blessing I will bless thee, and multiplying I will multiply thee. And so, after he had patiently endured, he obtained the promise.—Hebrews 6:12-15. [When you patiently endure, you obtain the promise.]


Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.—James 1:2-3.


Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain. Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Grudge not one against another, brethren, lest ye be condemned: behold, the judge standeth before the door. Take, my brethren, the prophets, who have spoken in the name of the Lord, for an example of suffering affliction, and of patience. Behold, we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.—James 5:7-11.


For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God endure grief, suffering wrongfully. For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.—1 Peter 2:19-20.


He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.—Revelation 13:10.

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Old Testament on Patience

The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.—Ecclesiastes 7:8.

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Whatever is brought upon you, take cheerfully, and be patient when you are changed to a low estate; for gold is tried in the fire, and acceptable souls in the furnace of adversity.—Wisdom of Ben Sirach 2:4-5.


The living book of the living was manifested in the hearts of little children: No one could have become manifest from among those who have believed in salvation unless that book had appeared; for this reason, the merciful one, the faithful one, Jesus, was patient in accepting sufferings until he took that book.—The Gospel of Truth, Codex I, 3 and XII, 2.

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Edna Miriam Lister
1884—1971
The original Pioneering Mystic, Christian Platonist philosopher, American Idealist, Founder, Society of the Universal Living Christ, minister, teacher, author, wife, and mother.


Edna Lister


Etymology of patience: Latin patiens, patient-, present participle of pati, to endure.


Patience is an abstract principle.

Patience is a law of being.

Patience is a soul virtue.

Having patience can be a severe initiation.


A Noiseless Patient Spider
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory
it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant
vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament,
filament out of itself,
Ever unreeling them,
ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached,
in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,
seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d,
till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling
catch somewhere, O my soul.
—Walt Whitman


References

Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, 2023.

The Holy Bible. King James Version (KJV). Public Domain.

The Nag Hammadi Library. James M. Robinson, ed. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

The Oxford English Dictionary: Compact Ed., 2 vols. E.S.C. Weiner, editor. Oxford University Press, 1971.

Whitman, Walt. A Noiseless Patient Spider. Leaves of Grass, no. 19. David McKay, ed. Philadelphia: 1900.