The Perfect Result of Endurance

James 5:7 exhorts us Christians to be patient.  Patience is going through affliction without murmuring against God, and suffering injury from others without taking revenge on them.  Endurance, or long-suffering, is patience extended and lengthened out.  Remarkably, James 1:4 says that enduring affliction or injury has more effect on perfecting a Christian, and taking us further along the road to spiritual completeness, than anything else.  Why?  I think the answer is to be found in how strong the feelings are that the quality of patience must overcome.  The suppression of the emotion of revenge, conquering the fiery desire to get even with those who hurt us, takes great power. I grew up with westerns as the staple of television and the movies.  Almost every western is built around the motive of revenge.  The plot is driven by the main character’s efforts to even the score.  We can all identify with such characters; the feelings run deep.  Patiently controlling self-centered desires to complain and strike back, in view of a greater good to be attained from God, is at the heart of Christian moral change.