“Being strengthened with all power according to His glorious might so that you may have full endurance and patience, and joyfully“
What we learn here is that strength, in this sense, is the combination of patience and longsuffering. The ability to outlast the enemy.
These two traits combined give us endurance. That is our ability to continue to press forward despite discomfort. That is one of the traits we must develop as men if we are going to survive this world.
But even more important is the last word of this verse – joyfully. Some versions say “with joy”. Patience and longsuffering joyfully is our ability to not only bear the difficulty of life but to do so with a smile.
We all admire those men who can smile and laugh through the darkest of hours. Through the horrors of combat or the normal difficulty of life, they somehow find humor. They somehow find a way to smile through it all.
We can develop that ability to laugh through the pain if we remember the goal we have. That is the goal of eternal life. We can develop patience if we also submerge ourselves into the present moment. Pain only becomes unbearable when we start wishing it would end or wondering how much longer it is going to last. Then we start to scramble and look for relief and it only makes it worse. But if we can train our minds to sit calmly, even joyfully, in that discomfort, we will have massive power.
Pain is reduced when you just allow yourself to feel the pain in the present moment. You can even test this in the gym when you are doing a painful exercise. When you start to think about how many reps you have left or wonder if you should just drop the weight, the exercise becomes much more difficult and painful. But if you just submerge yourself in the pain and allow yourself to feel it, the power of it is lessened. you begin to be able to manage it and even work through it. Learning how to do that provides you with great power.
Once you learn this in the gmy, you can transfer it to life. Then you can outlast the enemy.
That is all you have to do, just last longer than they do in order to win.
This life is an extreme experiment in endurance. You can either learn to manage the difficulty or get crushed by it.
