Recently after many years of putting it off, I bought a snowblower.

I hate moving snow.

I don't dislike it because it's hard work. I like splitting wood and stacking bales and all sorts of construction labour and other things that are hard physical work. I don't dislike it because I don't like power equipment. I happily use a lawnmower and weed wacker and different kinds of vehicles and farm equipment. I don't dislike it because it needs to be done repeatedly. I don't mind laundry or dishes or planting seeds or harvesting. But of all the ways to waste time, money, effort, fuel, and enthusiasm, surely moving snow from one place to another is up near the top.

The thing I dislike about moving snow is that with a little bit of patience snow is a problem that solves itself. It packs down fairly effectively and you can do things over top of it and in a few weeks it melts into the ground and you don't need to think about it anymore. I was taught that patience is a virtue and it produces perseverance and other apparently good things. So surely if it's good to be patient and snow deals with itself when we are patient, then moving snow is a waste of time and energy and the perceived need to move snow is a ridiculous social construct that we should ignore so that we can spend our time energy and other resources on more lasting and important things. Recently I saw a picture taken in New York City during the winter of 1900 and each shopkeeper had moved the snow in front of his store a few feet to the middle of the street and people were going about their business on foot with no need to do anything else with the snow. They waited for it to melt and it did.

However, that's not the way the world works anymore, especially here in the frozen north. My family doesn't want to limit the places we go between November and April to those that we can reach with snowmobiles and walking. If someone I know has a heart attack I want the ambulance to be able to get to their home. We might be willing to take a day off for snow here and there but we don't want to take a whole season off for snow. There is a boundary to how much patience seems appropriate. The patience that my grandparents' generation had with snow buildup doesn't seem suited to our society anymore.

This is not really a story about snow. It's about the suitable limits of patience.

Patience, along with other Christian virtues, is only a virtue when it's in proper balance and proportion. Impatience is not a virtue, it's a vice and is usually seen as having not enough patience, so we rush over things that should be allowed to take more time. However, it's possible to fall off the path into the other ditch too and have too much patience so that we drag out projects that should move along more quickly or wait around for things to happen rather than taking action.

Martin Luther didn't need to get himself kicked out of the Roman Catholic church. He could have waited for the organization to realize that selling indulgences wasn't a good idea and then address his other concerns with church practice at the time. Those things did happen, in the fullness of time, without Luther's involvement. But he didn't want to wait - he nailed his list of complaints to the church door in Wittenburg, started one version of the Protestant Reformation, and our branch of the church became possible because of that impatience. Likewise, Luther's own followers could have waited for him to get over his fascination with keeping strong ties between the church and the state. But they didn't have the patience and the Anabaptists and Baptists of the reformation pushed ahead with a separation between church and state that we now think of as obvious but drew persecution and hardship for them at the time. Billy Graham could have waited for God, in the fullness of time, to draw people to Himself but he didn't have the patience for that. Instead, he pushed ahead through the minefield of revival evangelism towards spiritual renewal across North America and Europe. Martin Luther King Jr could have been more patient and waited for white Christians in southern states to recognize the civil rights of Black Americans and make changes to their society without disruption and protest but he didn't have the patience for that and in faith he pushed for changes that, looking back, seem like they should have been obvious to everyone but for some reason were not. Jesus could have stuck around for ten or twenty years and engaged in gradual discussion with the people selling doves and changing money in the temple until they gradually changed their ways. But he didn't have the patience for it – he made a whip, chased them out, and moved on to the next thing on his to-do list.

Sometimes being patient is a virtue but not always. Sometimes it's important to push ahead with something that doesn't seem acceptable or convenient. If you have symptoms of a serious illness it's not good to patiently wait for them to go away on their own. It's good in that situation to set patience aside and get on the phone with your doctor right away and make an appointment as soon as you can. If your toddler runs out into traffic that's not the time to patiently discuss the merits of staying on the sidewalk. It's time to throw patience out the window and get out there to snatch them off the street. Sometimes in families and churches and circles of close friends, there are situations that need to be dealt with and those situations cause harm. It's not good to sit by filled with patient hope for them to get better on their own. It's better to become impatient and push for changes that should have happened a long time ago and certainly need to happen as soon as possible. Patience, like the other virtues besides love, is only good in moderation.

The concern that comes up when we realize the value of sometimes being impatient is that we will become pushy or destructive so that we cause more problems than we fix. In these situations, we need what theologian Stanley Hauerwas calls peaceable confrontation. Peaceable confrontation is a commitment based on Matthew chapter 18 to calling out problems and dealing with them directly combined with a commitment to not destroying the person we disagree with. If we are only committed to not destroying anyone or anything, the result is that we don't rise to the challenges before us when we should. If we are only committed to confrontation, the result is that we bulldoze all those who disagree with us and either drive ourselves into isolation or become dictators. But with a combined commitment to both confront situations that require attention AND not destroy the person we are confronting, there is a possibility for renewal and growth.

Back to the snow analogy, I have sometimes pushed too hard and too far with a tractor while clearing snow and in doing so run over valuable buried things, breaking the equipment I was using. That's not good. I was confrontational without being peaceable. On the other hand, I have sometimes avoided moving snow at all because I don't enjoy it and wish it wasn't necessary, or maybe because I was fearful about breaking something, which means that my family and I were hemmed in and unable to do things we needed to do because I did not push hard enough. I was peaceable without being confrontational. I need both a commitment to get out there and do what needs doing but also a commitment to not destroy the process and participants.

This is a tricky balance with snow removal equipment and also when we think about it in our personal and church lives. Can we say to each other in the faith community that we are committed to confronting but also committed to doing it in a peaceable way?

Are there things in your life that you need to push harder so that the risk of becoming destructive is real and you need to specifically guard against it? Do you ever set aside important goals because it would mean pushing yourself or someone else or an organization in uncomfortable ways? Are you in a relationship with anyone that would get uncomfortable if they said important and true things that push you?

I'm going out to move some snow while I think about that.