Neal A. Maxwell wrote: “The more we try to express long-suffering towards others, the greater and deeper our adoration of the Lord will become, reflecting greater appreciation for this perfect quality within Him.
Given our moral agency, God’s long-suffering becomes vitally necessary for God to tutor us in process of time, encouraging the further alignment of our own desires with His. Even if such an alignment finally fails to happen fully, God’s mercy and loving kindness and long-suffering will nevertheless have striven within us, and the record will be clear. God’s many specific entreaties will have been rejected because of our rebelliousness. Even though His redemptive arm “was lengthened out all the day long” (2 Nephi 28:32) it is often unnoticed, or turned aside, by many who have grasped at it.
In addition to our mistaking God’s long-suffering for indulgence, there is another error we can make. For example, we can wrongly conclude there is no hurry for us to change. Contemporary society is awash in these two errors. Thereby, needed opportunities for our repentance pass unused, creating real casualties and victims. Thereby too, estrangement from Jesus is further widened by the dulling of our capacity for genuine spiritual sensitivity or even redeeming shame. Shame is an emotion to which some moderns have become almost total strangers (Mosiah 4:13). No vertigo is as vicious as in those who try to “spin” their shame. Shame is so much more than a face made briefly warm and red. Real shame scalds the soul.
Thus, frail and imperfect as we are now, the failure to develop the divine attributes, including long-suffering and justice, does create real victims in marriages, at work, among family, friends and neighbors.
Consider, for instance, the awful perils of a political system which is significantly estranged from truth—whether in dialogue, in the public record, or in campaigns. Being politically offended but without spiritual standards is not the same thing as righteous indignation.
Likewise, ponder how the absence of graciousness in human relationships automatically exalts rudeness, bringing so much bitterness in human interactions and communication.
Vengeance is directly opposite to long suffering. “Getting even”does not really balance the scales at all; it only distorts them even further—whether practiced between nations, tribes, or spouses!
Perhaps most sobering, when compared to genuine long-suffering of Him who is perfect in His love, is the impatient, mortal misuse of power, which carries such awful consequences. In Notes from the House of the Dead, Fydor Dostoyevsky wrote of grossly misused power:
“Whoever has experienced the power, the complete ability to humiliate another human being. . . with the most extreme humiliation, willy-nilly loses power over his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has a capacity for development, it develops finally into a disease. . . . The human being and the citizen die within the tyrant forever; return to humanity, to repentance, to regeneration becomes almost impossible.” (iii)
There are those—more than a few—who really do have an actual lust to govern or to boss others. One sees it in small businesses as well as in big governments. Historian Barbara Tuchman wrote insightfully: “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is the lust for power, named by Tacitus, as the most flagrant of all passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is it favorite field of exercise.” (iv)
Our experiences with power can help us to appreciate better how God’s power reflects his perfect love, accompanied by mercy and long-suffering. On a mortal scale, one learns of it in President George Washington: “In all history few men who possessed unassailable power have used that power so gently and self-effacingly for what their best instincts told them was the welfare of their neighbors and all mankind.”(v)
Mortals have not yet invented a pride meter which would be the equivalent of the wrist bands or other warning devices worn by workers in nuclear facilities. The latter can detect and show when the level of radioactivity has reached dangerous levels. We do not have a counterpart that warns us of the deadly surge of gross, prideful arrogance, which can take an even more devastating toll.
Our present capacity for meekness is doubtless reflective of how much we had already developed that quality in the premortal world. It’s greater development can be greatly enhanced by family life, discipleship, and so on. Furthermore the disparities in meekness among mortals are too great to attribute solely to mortal environment; we brought certain “luggage” with us.
As we strive to emulate Jesus, it is reassuring for us to know that the Prophet Joseph Smith spoke of how true disciples can eventually reach the point where they lose all desire for sin—and this would include the desire to compel or dominate others. But, he observed realistically, “This is a station to which no man arrived in a moment.”(vi) Development discipleship is thus incremental, another self-evident reason for us to rejoice in the long-suffering of the Lord and to ponder anew the need for that attribute and patience in ourselves. ~Neal A. Maxwell, The Promise of Discipleship (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book: 2001) 49-52
iii. Quoted in Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 976.
iv. March of Folly, 381.
v. Flexner, Washington, xvi
vi. Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 51.
