Patience is a Virtue

“But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” Romans 8:25 (ESV)

Athletes aren't very good at waiting, and if we're being fair, most coaches aren't either. We want progress now, playing time now, the scholarship offer now, the starting position now, the injury healed now, and the results from all of our work yesterday. We live in a world where almost everything is available immediately, so when something we really want requires months or even years of waiting, patience can feel less like a virtue and more like torture.

Romans 8:25 (ESV) says, “But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” It's a great verse about hope and patience, but we have to be careful not to turn it into a promise that if athletes patiently wait long enough, God will eventually give them the opportunity, healing, scholarship, starting position, or athletic success they're hoping for. That's not what Paul is talking about.

Romans 8 is much bigger than our personal goals. Paul is talking about suffering, redemption, and the future hope believers have in Christ. In Romans 8:23, he talks about believers waiting for “the redemption of our bodies,” and then explains that we're saved in hope even though we don't yet see the fullness of what God has promised. Romans 8:25 isn't telling us to patiently wait until God gives us what we want. It's telling Christians to keep trusting while we wait for what God has actually promised.

I think that's a much stronger message for athletes anyway because biblical patience isn't sitting around believing everything will eventually work out exactly the way you pictured it. Sometimes it won't. You can rehab your butt off and still not return as quickly as you hoped. You can contact fifty college coaches and still be waiting on an offer. You can work hard in practice and remain behind somebody on the depth chart. You can do everything your coach asks and still have to wait longer than you think is fair, and sometimes the opportunity you're waiting for isn't coming at all.

That's where patience starts exposing what you actually believe.

It's easy to trust God when His timing matches yours. It's a whole lot harder when you've been praying about something for months and nothing seems to be moving. It's easy to have a good attitude when you know your opportunity is coming next week, but what happens when you don't know if it's coming at all? That's where Christian patience becomes different from positive thinking because our confidence isn't supposed to be rooted in believing God will eventually give us the outcome we want. Our confidence is rooted in God Himself.

That doesn't mean you stop working while you wait. Athletes sometimes confuse patience with passivity, and they're not the same thing. If you're waiting for playing time, keep getting better. If you're waiting to return from an injury, attack the rehabilitation you've been medically cleared to do. If you're waiting on recruiting opportunities, keep communicating, developing, and putting yourself in position to be evaluated. If you're waiting for your role to grow, become so dependable in your current role that your coach has a hard time ignoring you.

You can be patient and still be hungry as hell.

What you can't do is use impatience as permission to become bitter, lazy, entitled, or impossible to coach. If your attitude falls apart every time God's timing or your coach's timing doesn't match yours, there's probably something deeper that needs to be dealt with. Waiting has a way of exposing entitlement because sometimes what we call impatience is really frustration that we haven't gotten what we think we're owed.

Christian coaches need to wrestle with patience too because we're leading people who aren't going to develop on our preferred timeline. Some athletes understand something after one correction, while another athlete may need to hear it twenty times. Some freshmen adjust immediately, while others need months before they become comfortable. Some athletes mature quickly, while others are going to test every ounce of patience we thought the Holy Spirit gave us.

That's where patience can't become an excuse for weak leadership, though. Being patient doesn't mean eliminating standards, avoiding consequences, or allowing the same destructive behavior forever because we're afraid of being too hard on somebody. You can be patient with a person while still holding them accountable. You can give somebody grace while telling them the truth, and you can recognize that growth takes time without pretending every behavior is acceptable.

Galatians 5:22 through 23 gives us an important correction here too. The ESV says, “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control; against such things there is no law.” The word is “patience” in the ESV, not “forbearance,” which appears in some other translations.

There's another important distinction in that passage because Paul says “fruit” of the Spirit, singular, not “fruits.” He's describing the character produced by the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer, not giving Christians nine personality traits to master through enough self improvement. We absolutely participate in spiritual growth through obedience and discipline, but we shouldn't reduce the fruit of the Spirit to another performance checklist where we try harder to become loving, joyful, peaceful, and patient enough to prove we're good Christians.

For Christian athletes and coaches, that should create some conviction because it's possible to talk about faith constantly while showing very little evidence of it when competition gets uncomfortable. We can put Scripture in our bios, pray before matches, attend FCA, and call ourselves Christian leaders, but then completely lose our minds when an official makes a bad call, tear into a teammate after a mistake, become jealous when somebody else succeeds, or treat people like garbage because we're frustrated.

If the Holy Spirit is working in us, there should eventually be evidence somewhere in the way we live.

Patience is one of those places where sports can expose us pretty quickly because competition puts our emotions under pressure. Can you stay composed after making three mistakes in a row, or does frustration take over the rest of your match? Can you handle being corrected without snapping back at your coach? Can you wait for your opportunity without secretly rooting against the teammate playing ahead of you? Can you deal with an official's terrible call without allowing one moment to control the next ten points?

Coaches aren't off the hook either. Can we correct without humiliating? Can we give an athlete time to develop without labeling them too quickly? Can we listen to an athlete's explanation without immediately assuming they're making an excuse? Can we handle a mistake without making an eighteen year old feel like they personally ruined our lives?

Patience isn't weakness, and it doesn't mean lowering competitive standards. Sometimes patience actually requires more strength because you have to control the reaction you desperately want to have in the moment. You have to slow yourself down enough to respond instead of explode, listen instead of assume, and coach the next play instead of staying furious about the last one.

It also matters how patient we are with ourselves. Athletes can become so obsessed with reaching the next level that they don't recognize how much development actually takes time. You aren't going to fix every technical weakness in two practices, build significant strength in a week, become mentally tough because you listened to one podcast, or completely transform your game because you had one great workout. Development is usually a whole lot less exciting than that. It's repetition, correction, failure, adjustment, more repetition, and enough consistency for small improvements to start stacking up.

That's why patience and perseverance belong pretty close together. Patience keeps you from demanding immediate results, while perseverance keeps you working when those results haven't shown up yet. Neither one guarantees you'll get everything you want, but both affect who you're becoming while you pursue it.

For Christians, that's the bigger issue anyway. We spend so much time asking God when He's going to change our circumstances that sometimes we forget to ask what He's doing in us while we wait. Maybe the waiting is exposing how much control we think we need. Maybe it's showing us how dependent our identity has become on an athletic outcome. Maybe it's revealing entitlement, jealousy, anger, fear, or a complete inability to trust God unless He gives us what we want.

That's why Romans 8:25 hits harder when we leave it in its actual context. Christian hope isn't wishful thinking that tomorrow will finally go our way. It's confidence in what God has promised even while we're living in a world where suffering, disappointment, uncertainty, and waiting are still very real.

So keep working while you wait, keep competing while you wait, and keep preparing for the opportunity you hope is coming. There's nothing wrong with wanting the starting position, praying for healing, pursuing the scholarship, or asking God to open a door, but don't make your faith dependent on whether He gives you the answer you wanted.

Anybody can be patient when they know exactly when the waiting ends. Christian patience gets tested when you don't know, and that's when you find out whether your trust is actually in God or just in the outcome you're hoping He'll give you.