The Jewel of Perseverance

"In the dark, all alone, I began to pray... no... I began to cry out," the scientist said.

A*, a WashU staff scientist spoke to graduate group last night about how his faith is incorporated into his daily research. He told the story of doing research into late night with no one in his lab desperate for results, and that’s when he started crying out to Jesus. “He’s my savior, so I thought this was a good time for him to save me,” he continued. And we proceeded to hear about A’s life that’s rife with prayer. “The knowledge and the science is God’s, I had to develop the patience to wait for Him to hand them to me.” “I am asking not for success, but from success, because being with God is success.” That night, in the dark, God showed A that He hears him. “It was like a switch, and suddenly there were results.” A declared, “and the holder of the switch, is God.”
But the hardest part of A’s story is that it required persistent asking, constant waiting, and a willingness to find peace knowing that it’s in God’s hands. This is perseverance in faith.
Perseverance is a word that does not jive with my system. I'm just not friends with it. In fact I had to spell check it, because my first try yielded red squigglies. I like results and I like them fast. Working with people, though, just doesn’t seem to be a results oriented field. People are fickle, they are stable one day and not the next. They have strong convictions one day, and decide to jump ship the next. They want autonomy today and want you to tell them what to do tomorrow. They are just plain difficult.
Perseverance in my field, is a medicine that tastes bitter and burns going down. But I imagine the same is true for A and his dark room full of microscopes. Will there be results today? Tomorrow? in a month? You just never know. Yet A wakes up in the morning, greets God with a prayer, and says “how can I live for you today?” And the main difference? Peace and Joy--priceless.
I asked A how he cultivated this skill of persevering? And he merely stated that it was out of extreme situations that he learned to pray, so he had little advice for those who may not be in desperate need. I smiled to myself thinking just how soft I was. Out of pressure he has a diamond, and I? Well, I just have a glass fake. In the words of my geeky hubby “I’m a minister PWN’D by a scientist in the realm of faith.”

(*real name not used to protect the scientist's anonymity)