Reflecting on Divine Patience

Starting Over and the Burden of Time

Sep 17, 2024

About the author: Sara Mannen is the McDonald-Agape Research Fellow in Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. She is working with Professor Tom Greggs on the Ecclesiology After Christendom project. Sara recently completed her PhD on divine personhood in Karl Barth. She is passionate about theological study, especially modern and contemporary doctrines of God, and its import for the life of the church and world. She lives in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, with her husband and two daughters.

“Divine patience precludes imposing our categories of efficiency onto God.”
—Tyler Frick1

In my mid-thirties, married with school-aged children, I decided to completely change directions in my career. I reduced my hours at work, started a graduate program, and set out on what I hoped would be a new direction in life. I started over. If starting over was not terrifying enough, my career aspiration was to become a theologian. Theology is not a high-demand profession, especially compared to my previous and relatively secure career.

I recognize that I am privileged since I decided to start over and change direction in my life. I know many people are forced to start over due to life circumstances outside their control—an unexpected loss of a loved one, a relationship, a job, a tragedy from a natural disaster to war, or an unexpected health problem, to name a few. Starting over has a way of highlighting how our culture judges our worth based on how effectively and successfully we use our time.

For my last blog post here, I wanted to take the opportunity to reflect theologically on my struggle with feeling the constant pressure of time—the compulsion to rush at lightning speed from one accomplishment, milestone, or line on my CV to the next—while starting over. More importantly though, for the purposes of this post, I want to highlight how my faith was challenged, encouraged, and strengthened by the example of some of my dear friends. They are the ones who reminded me of the faithfulness and patience of God, and that divine patience is not subject to my or our culture’s ideas of success or effectiveness. Like John the Baptist in Grunewald’s painting of the crucifixion that hung in Barth’s office, they pointed to Christ, who is the wisdom and patience of God.

Since the beginning of graduate school and starting over, I knew I was late to the game. Time—or my seeming lack of it—has been a burden since I am keenly aware that starting over in mid-life means I do not have as much time as those at a similar stage in their career. I have felt perpetually behind, and the need to catch up to everyone else if my decision to start over would be “worth” it. I needed to prove my decision was not wasteful or a fool’s errand. I was beholden to the idea of time as measured by productivity. The pressure to “beat” time by checking off as many boxes on the academic list of requirements and accomplishments has persisted from my first day back to school when I brought a paper and pen to take notes while every other classmate used a laptop to my current awareness that my eventual death limits the extent and number of any future research projects.

One of my friends who was in the exact same position as me—mid-life and starting over in a PhD program—served as a witness to a completely different understanding of time. Where I was sprinting in some imaginary race, she was slowly, methodically, and patiently “strolling” through the process. This could not be chalked up to differences in our personalities. No—her different pace was because she was committed to trusting God patiently and refusing to rush. Her resilience and strength to slow her pace were a protest and rejection of the demands of our culture for production and efficiency and what it considers “success.” Demands that are only intensified in academia.

By refusing to give in to the pressure to rush frantically, she was a living witness to God's patience and wisdom. Karl Barth’s pairing of the divine attributes of patience and wisdom offers an insight that speaks powerfully to my struggle with time. I felt the pressure to be productive and efficient—to prove that choosing to start over and change direction was wise and not a selfish turn to foolishness.

Barth’s definition of divine patience affirms God’s will to give us space and time to develop:

We define patience as His will, deep-rooted in His essence and constituting His divine being and action, to allow to another—for the sake of His own grace and mercy and in the affirmation of His holiness and justice—space and time for the development of its own existence, thus conceding to this existence a reality side by side with His own, and fulfilling His will towards this other in such a way that He does not suspend and destroy it as this other but accompanies and sustains it and allows it to develop in freedom.2

Barth argues that divine patience demonstrates that God’s grace and mercy are not characterized by obliterating or overpowering us. God gives us time! God respects and accepts our reality and independent life alongside the divine reality and life.3 However, importantly, this is not God’s indifference towards us and our plight as sinners; rather, God takes up our cause in Jesus Christ, whose penitence and acceptance of divine judgment for our sake has secured divine patience for all of humanity.4 Unsurprisingly for Barth, based on Hebrews 1:3, he declares “that Jesus Christ is the meaning of God’s patience.”5 Barth concludes that “the meaning of the divine patience is a summons to have faith.”6

Many of you may wonder if I am grasping at straws, connecting this to my struggle with the “burden” of limited time when starting over. Am I not taking divine patience as a summons to faith and misappropriating that to the pressure for efficiency and productivity—a pressure that grows exponentially when one starts over? I would argue that Barth’s connecting divine patience to divine wisdom must not be ignored because it teaches us that God is intentional and purposeful in all that God wills, and this is vital for resisting our culture’s obsession with effectiveness.

Divine wisdom teaches us that God is not capricious or arbitrary. Barth defines divine wisdom:

God’s will expressed in His Word is neither in itself nor in its manifestation of such a kind that it can even be comparable, let alone identical, with an abyss of what is ultimately chance or caprice…The wisdom of God is that…He knows not only what He wills, but why and wherefore He wills it.7

This means that God’s patience is intentional and effective, but in God’s time as manifested in Jesus Christ. Barth is confident that God’s Word does not return void.8 In conversation with my friend, Tyler Frick, he summarized the significance of this perfectly: “Divine patience precludes imposing our categories of efficiency onto God.”9 My anxiety-driven hurried pace indicated my lack of trust in God’s patience and wisdom. I had succumbed to a cultural demand for proving my worth through meeting demands for productivity—for proving starting over was not a foolish dead end—and was also demanding the same of God. Instead, the truth of divine patience calls for a different response on my part.

My friends demonstrated how to respond to God’s patience with gratitude for the time they have been given and a corresponding patience themselves. This is not quietism nor passively sitting around; rather, it is an attitude of calm in the midst of a world that wants us to move at an ever-faster pace. I am slowly learning how to set aside the checklist attitude and evaluate my motivation for each new project and task—to move forward in trust rather than anxiety. I am confident that God’s gracious and merciful patience is what allowed me to start over. Starting over is terrifying in a world that judges us by our “success” in efficiency and productivity, but God’s grace is fresh and new each moment.

In Jesus Christ, we can start over.

Reflecting on Divine Patience

Starting Over and the Burden of Time

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