Patience that Endures: Fruit of the Spirit

By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 02/08/2023

I grew up in the country, the foothills of Appalachia. We lived on a gravel road lined with corn fields for 25 yards and then giant pine trees for miles. My grandparents’ home marked the delineation between the corn fields and the pine trees. Immediately beyond their driveway was a small hill with a slight curve. When you were sitting on their porch, this was the view. We used to sit on that porch and drink Coke out of glass bottles while snapping so many green beans we were confident our fingers would have blisters the next day. My grandpa was a fiery old man. He hated how fast people drove up and down the road, and he was known to stand out by the road and yell at the cars that passed by–to no avail. They never slowed down. He was not a patient man. They say opposites attract, and this was surely the case with my grandparents. While my grandpa was a fiery impatient man who lived life in a constant state of anger, frustration, and discontent, my grandma was the picture of calm, contentment, and patience. It’s funny because when you’re a kid, you don’t always notice the patterns of dysfunction…or chaos… in your family. I certainly didn’t. We spent our lives joking about Grandpa’s behavior and wishing we could nominate my grandma for sainthood, but we never really talked about these behaviors, their consequences, etc. Even as adults, the grandkids still look back on Grandpa’s impatience and discontentment and kind of shake our heads saying, “he was something…” It’s only been in my adult years that I’ve really thought about the amount of patience my grandma had to have possessed to live and thrive in life with, and maybe even despite, my grandpa’s attitude and behaviors. When I first started studying patience as it pertains to the fruit of the spirit, I immediately thought of my grandma, and as I studied even more, I knew her picture should be beside the definition in the dictionary.