A Christian Worldview from Silicon Valley

As we walked from the 10th green to the 11th tee, I asked my friend about his friend Pete. I had just met Pete a couple of hours earlier and liked him right away, but he was in one of the two foursomes behind us so I hadn’t had a chance to get to know him at all. Mostly I wondered if he was what we Christians call “a believer.”

My friend said that Pete was not a Christian, although he might think of himself as a Christian, that he was recently married, and that he was an excellent athlete and very competitive.

“Is there an opportunity to talk to him about his faith?” I wondered.

My friend thought about that and said he thought there probably would be an opportunity for that — or more specifically that Pete would be open to such a conversation — around the time that he and his wife started having children.

My friend, by the way, is a long-time and very mature Christian who has spoken to many people personally and publicly about their need for Jesus. So he wasn’t putting this off because of any sort of fear, but he was putting it off (at least for now) until a more opportune time.

I marveled at my friend’s patience, and told him so.

Most of us have a sense of urgency when it comes to this kind of thing and if someone doesn’t listen to us the first time, we keep after them and keep after them until we “get them in the water” or (too often) drive them away forever.

There is little question that patience (part of the fruit borne in us by God’s Spirit) is a good thing. And I don’t wonder whether or not I have it, I wonder where I should be using it. Perhaps with some patience, I’ll find out.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 5:49 pm and is filed under Jesus, Life Change, Spiritual Disciplines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.