“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.” — Psalm 51:17
God’s patience is not passive, it is a relentless mercy that tears down our illusions to make room for His grace. —D.
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God has a strange, old-fashioned patience, the kind that won’t leave us alone but won’t force itself on us either. He waits with a quiet ferocity, never rushed, never distracted. He watches for the moment we might notice what He’s been seeing all along: the brittle shells we build around ourselves, the hollow towers of pride we think will keep us safe. What God wants is not our performance, not our polish, but our sight. He wants us to see that we are made of dust and longing. That every spark of goodness in us is His, not our own. That every ounce of virtue, every movement toward mercy or truth, was planted in us by His hand.
So He moves through our hearts like a persistent wind, sweeping the undergrowth, stirring the old leaves. Sometimes He brings mercy with gentleness, a quiet word in a quiet hour, a moment of clarity that asks us to step back, to bow lower, to let go. Other times, He comes like a storm, tearing at the rafters of our pride, shaking loose everything we’ve nailed into place. It is not cruelty. It is not wrath for wrath’s sake. It is love, fierce and knowing. It is His way of hollowing out the hollow places, of breaking down the scaffolding of self-reliance so that we might finally be held. What feels like unraveling is, in truth, remaking.
God’s work in us is unrelenting, not because He is harsh, but because He loves too deeply to let us settle for less than Himself. He will strip away every false strength, every hidden idol, until all that’s left is a soul emptied of pretense, open to mercy. And it’s only there, stripped, still, surrendered, that we find what we could never manufacture: the fullness of His grace. His love is a fire and a balm. It burns through the lie. It heals what we thought was too far gone. It opens the soul to a beauty we were not made to carry alone. His fierce tenderness does not give up. It remakes us again and again, not because we are worthy, but because He is. And He will have us whole.