Growing up with serious aspirations to be a professional athlete meant that I learned a lot of lessons early about the reality of mastery. One of these lessons, a favorite of mine, was on delayed gratification, or the fact that the rewards of our labor often lag behind our actual effort. Consequently, if we want to achieve long-term success, we not only have to sacrifice short-term pleasure that would thwart our goals, but we also can’t rely on seeing our efforts immediately turn into results.
A simple example is physical fitness. To meaningfully and permanently change your level of fitness, you have to work out consistently, eat healthy, sleep well, and avoid things that will harm your recovery. In many ways, you have to reorient your lifestyle around this goal.
As a result, not only will you probably have to sacrifice some of the things you used to enjoy (e.g., nightly ice cream, regularly sleeping in, intense weekend partying), you also have to spend a long time working on your physical fitness to make noticeable improvements. For someone who has never worked out, it could take months to reach a goal like running a certain distance without stopping or bench pressing a certain weight.
People of all disciplines understand this concept since delayed gratification happens when pursuing any challenging (worthwhile) goal. However, when it comes to our faith lives we sometimes expect things to work differently.
We believe that once we commit to praying regularly, reading Scripture daily, going to Adoration weekly, or making a regular confession, that we will see the fruits of those decisions right away. We expect that turning our lives over to God will transform us (nearly) overnight. We want to see the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—proliferate in our lives as soon as we increase our efforts.
Yet, as frustrating as it can be, the Holy Spirit rarely doles out his gifts on demand.
In the spiritual life, I call this inevitable lag in our self-perceived holiness behind our earnest efforts delayed sanctification.
Delayed sanctification can be a real challenge, often even more than in secular arenas like sports. When we pray for things, we tend to do it in a moment we feel we need that thing more than ever. And, the consequences of not having our prayers answered often feel like much higher stakes because of the eternal nature of our faith.
For example, if our husband offends us, we pray for the ability to forgive and let go of the hurt. We may even fast or perform other acts of faith or penance toward the goal of becoming a more forgiving wife. After all, if we hold onto that resentment, we fear not just the damage to our marriage but to our relationship with God.
Yet, God doesn’t always grant us the virtues we want right when we ask for them. He also doesn’t relieve us of our vices as soon as we pray for freedom.
Thus, we are left with two options in the face of delayed sanctification: the first, frustration that morphs into discouragement. It’s a real challenge not to question God’s love for us when we don’t hear from him right away. We can begin to wonder if prayer really “does” anything or if he cares enough about us to intervene. These frustrations, though understandable, can do more harm to our relationship with God, ourselves and other people than we realize, particularly when that frustration leads us to abandon our efforts and prayers altogether.
The second, however, is the golden goose of spiritual growth. If we so choose, delayed sanctification can lead us to gratitude for the three-fold opportunity to develop greater holiness. First, we pray for progress in some area like forgiveness. This prayer grows our faith in the Lord. Second, we have the chance to grow in patience as we wait for the Lord’s answer to our prayer. And third, perhaps after a time of persistent prayer and trust, God answers our prayer for greater forgiveness. Thus, our holiness increases in three ways, not just the one way we asked for!
If you ever find yourself discouraged about a lull in your spiritual progress, it may be worth giving this thought experiment a try. My husband suggested it to me in passing one day when I was lamenting over how I still have many days in which I am more distracted than I want to be while I pray (as every mom of small children knows, it can be hard to turn off the multitasking brain even when you want to).
The experiment goes like this:
Look back over the last 5-10 years of your life. Think about the virtues and graces you’ve prayed for most earnestly. Perhaps you desired greater compassion, obedience, courage, or humility. Maybe you prayed for healing in one or two of your relationships.
Write down those virtues and prayer requests.
Now, compare where you are in your spiritual life now—specifically in these areas you listed—to where you were 5 or 10 years ago. How different are you today than you were back then? In what ways has God already answered your prayers?
God works on the timeline of our entire lives. We, however, often view ourselves through a much narrower lens because we struggle with patience. We struggle to sacrifice our present desires to embrace the bigger picture, a picture that will admittedly be a little blurry until we meet Jesus in the next life. This impatience, though, is a big part of why God makes us wait for the good we desire, even when what we desire is such a high good like virtue or healing.
This is the paradoxical reality of delayed sanctification: because the fruits of our efforts lag behind our actual effort, we get a chance to grow even more in virtue by waiting for God to transform us. If we made all the progress we prayed for as soon as we prayed for it, the progress would stop there. Our faith, hope, love of God and patience would never be tested, and thus, they would never be given a chance to flourish under adversity.
Thanks be to God that he spares us from immediate satisfaction so we can spend that waiting time loving him for himself, not for the gifts he gives us.
Keep doing the Lord’s work!
~ Cameron