Christian Hope is Marked by Patience and Love

Where the Red Fern Grows, one of my favorite childhood books, is about a boy named Billy. Billy lives in the Ozarks, a coon-hunting mecca. After seeing an advertisement for two Redbone Coonhounds in a magazine, Billy starts saving every penny to get them. He sells crawfish to local fishermen and huckleberries to his grandfather, a grocer who promises to help Billy place the order for the pups once he’s earned the fifty dollars to buy them. Day after day, week after week, month after month, Billy deposits whatever coins he’s earned into an old tin can he keeps hidden in the barn. Finally, two years later, he proudly walks into his grandfather’s store and dumps the money on the counter.

“I was saving my money so I could buy two hound pups, and I did,” Billy proudly announces to Grandpa, who obviously has forgotten about Billy’s plan. Wilson Rawls, the book’s author, describes the scene beautifully through the narrating voice of Billy, now a grown man:

Grandpa stared at me over his glasses, and then back at the money.

“How long have you been saving this?” he asked.

“A long time, Grandpa,” I said.

“How long?” he asked.

I told him, “Two years.”

His mouth flew open and in a loud voice he said, “Two years!”

I nodded my head.

In vain, Grandpa tries to change the topic of conversation. After several minutes, Billy the narrator remembers that it was too much for my grandfather. He turned and walked away. I saw the glasses come off, and the old red handkerchief come out. I heard the good excuse of blowing his nose. He stood for several seconds with his back toward me. When he turned around, I noticed his eyes were moist.

In a quavering voice, he said, “Well, Son, it’s your money. You worked for it, and you worked hard. You got it honestly, and you want some dogs. We’re going to get those dogs.”

Reading those lines as a twelve-year-old boy, I couldn’t help but feel both Billy’s optimism and Grandpa’s sympathy. Rawls describes Billy’s determinism and patience so masterfully in chapter three that I couldn’t put the book down for the next seventeen. If those pups were so important to Billy, what lengths would he go to train them? Years later, I was equally moved by a scene in Cinema Paradiso where Salvatore waits night after night under the window of his beloved Elena until finally, after nine months, he wins her heart.

“Hope,” writes Saint Paul, “does not disappoint.” Why? “Because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5). As Where the Red Fern Grows and Cinema Paradiso show, hope never exists apart from love, and love always exists with hope. Billy saved his money in the hope of buying a pair of dogs that would become the love of his life, while Salvatore waited under the window of the love of his life in the hope that she would love him back. “Hope,” writes Pope Francis, “is born of love and based on the love springing from the pierced heart of Jesus upon the cross” (Spes non confundit, 3).

When one is in love, no wait is too long. Two years was nothing to Billy for a pair of hounds. Nine months is nothing to Salvatore for Elena. To Christians, no wait is too long for the return of the Bridegroom. “We live our lives in expectation of his return and in the hope of living forever in him,” Francis writes (Spes non confundit, 19).

This Jubilee of Hope is a wonderful time to rediscover the joy of waiting. Patience is the very mark of Christian hope. The Holy Father writes:

In our fast-paced world, we are used to wanting everything now. We no longer have time simply to be with others; even families find it hard to get together and enjoy one another’s company. Patience has been put to flight by frenetic haste, and this has proved detrimental, since it leads to impatience, anxiety and even gratuitous violence, resulting in more unhappiness and self-centeredness. (Spes non confundit, 4)

Francis laments that the internet has sapped our ability “to appreciate the changes of the seasons and their harvests” and “observe the life of animals and their cycles of growth” (4). 

The good news is that we can restore our patience through the simplest things. Reading that second book to the youngest, playing that extra inning with the oldest, walking with the middle kids to places we usually drive, or just going out in the night to catch a meteor.

Holy Scripture also gives us a deeper, spiritual way of restoring patience: by remembering God’s patience. The “God of all patience” (Rom. 15:5) for whom “one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day” (2 Peter 3:8), the God who “is waiting to be gracious” (Is. 30:18), patiently waits for us to return to Him (cf. Rom. 2:4), “not wishing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). “Patience,” writes Francis, “one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit, sustains our hope and strengthens it as a virtue and a way of life” (Spes non confundit, 4).

No one knew this better than Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who for a long time was terribly annoyed by a fidgety sister whose incessant noise-making tortured her meditation. With God’s help, Thérèse turned that irritation into a wellspring of grace simply because she consciously offered that time to the Lord as a “prayer of suffering.”

If we expect too much of ourselves this Jubilee, Pope Francis invites us to turn to saints like Thérèse and Paul who are “realists.” The latter “knows that life has its joys and sorrows, that love is tested amid trials, and that hope can falter in the face of suffering” (Spes non confundit, 4), which is precisely why the Apostle asks nothing more of us than to “rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, and persevere in prayer” (Rom. 12:12).

Photo by Mihály Köles on Unsplash