Love is Patient

A Picture of Patience


Come with me to Paris, France, 1954. Elie Wiesel is a correspondent for a Jewish newspaper. A decade earlier he was a prisoner in a Jewish concentration camp. A decade later he would be known as the author of Night, the Pulitzer Prize winning account of the Holocaust. Eventually he’ll be awarded the congressional Medal of Achievement and the Nobel Peace Prize.



But tonight Elie Wiesel is a 26-old unknown newspaper correspondent. He is about to interview the French author Francois Mauriac, who is a devout Christian. Mauriac is France’s most recent Nobel laureate for literature and an expert on French political life.

Wiesel shows up at Mauriac’s apartment, nervous and chain-smoking — his emotions still frayed from the German horror, his comfort as a writer still raw. The older Mauriac tries to put him at ease. He invites Wiesel in, and the two sit in the small room. Before Wiesel can ask a question, however, Mauriac, a staunch Roman Catholic, begins to speak about his favorite subject: Jesus. Wiesel grows uneasy. The name of Jesus is a pressed thumb on his infected wounds.

Wiesel tries to reroute the conversation but can’t. It is as though everything in creation leads back to Jesus. Jerusalem? Jerusalem is where Jesus ministered. The Old Testament? Because of Jesus, the Old is now enriched by the New. Mauriac turns every topic toward the Messiah. The anger in Wiesel begins to heat. The Christian anti-Semitism he’d grown up with, the layers of grief from Sighet, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald — it all boils over. He puts away his pen, shuts his notebook, and stands up angrily.

“Sir,” he said to the still-seated Mauriac, “you speak of Christ. Christians love to speak of him. The passion of Christ, the agony of Christ, the death of Christ. In your religion, that is all you speak of. Well, I want you to know that tens years ago, not very far from here, I knew Jewish children every one of whom suffered a thousand times more, six million times more, than Christ on the cross. And we don’t speak about them. Can you understand that, sir? We don’t speak about them.” (David Aikman, Great Souls: Six Who Changed the Century, Nashville: Word Publishing, 1998, p. 341-342.)

Mauriac is stunned. Wiesel turns and marches out the door. Mauriac sits in shock, his woolen blanket still around him. The young reporter is pressing the elevator button when Mauriac appears in the hall. He gently reaches for Wiesel’s arm. “Come back,” he implores. Wiesel agrees, and the two sit on the sofa. At this point Mauriac begins to weep. He looks at Wiesel but says nothing. Just tears.

Wiesel starts to apologize. Mauriac will have nothing of it. Instead he urges his young friend to talk. He wants to hear about it — the camps, the trains, the deaths. He asks Wiesel why he hasn’t put this to paper. Wiesel tells him the pain is too severe. He’s made a vow of silence. The older man tells him to break it and speak out.

The evening changed them both. The drama became the soil of a life-long friendship. They corresponded until Mauriac’s death in 1970. “I owe Francois Mauriac my career,” Wiesel has said . . .and it was to Mauriac that Wiesel sent the first manuscript of Night.

What if Mauriac had kept the door shut? Would anyone have blamed him? Cut by the sharp words of Wiesel, he could have become impatient with the angry young man and have been glad to be rid of him. But he didn’t and he wasn’t. He reacted decisively, quickly, and lovingly. He was “slow to boil.” And, because he was, a heart began to heal.

May I urge you to do the same?

“God is being patient with you” (2 Pet. 3:9). And if God is being patient with you, can’t you pass on some patience to others? Of course you can.

Because before love is anything else: Love is patient.
Excerpted from A Love Worth Giving by Max Lucado
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Message from Bob: In a similar way that love is patient ... haters can also be patient. (this clip is long but a must watch for Christians and freedom lovers everywhere.)We must not allow our desire to be patient with others to be confused with our need as a society of free people to stand up to the vowed enemies of freedom. They have a death wish fo each of us, and are willing to die to fulfill that wish. This is not a joke or time for philosophical or religious discussion. This is war. The free world must stand against this enemy of freedom, or they will systematically destroy all of us.

Just as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and haters of Israel worldwide deny the Jewish Holocaust ... calling the murder of millions by Hitler and the Nazis a myth. Today's politically correct establishment would pretend that there are not 100 million Islamic Jihadist believers who are potential terrorists worldwide. This small percentage of Muslims worldwide are committed to political world domination with sharia law and their crazed religious beliefs; and to fulfill the Koran's call for the murder of all of us unbelievers who do not submit to their demands. The leaders of these enemies of the free people of the world have been methodically implementing their plans for more than sixty years ... this did not begin on 9/11. And now they are freely meeting and recruiting radicals in America.
Watch these clips: clip 1 clip 2 clip 3 clip 4 crazy Islam
I know we all want to just ignore this insanity and go about living our lives in peace, but our enemies plan does not allow for that option.

We must stand together to stop this evil that has now spread throughout the world.
God Bless you my friends, Bob