By Dr. Steve Crawley, Executive Director • Ministers Resource Services
Galatians 5:22-23 includes “patience” as a part of the Fruit of the Spirit. For many of us, the discipline of patience is a difficult one to implement and even more difficult to stick with over time. Yet patience pays off in both the spiritual realm and the financial realm.
Longtime Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chair Charlie Munger states: “It’s waiting that helps you as an investor, and a lot of people just can’t stand to wait.”
Adam Grossman shares, “Why aren’t people patient? It stems, in my view, from the dynamic of compound interest. This is the idea that money grows very slowly at first but then accelerates over time as the dollars get larger. A young person with just $1,000 in savings, for example, would see just a $100 gain if the market rose by 10%. But an older person, with maybe $1 million in savings, would enjoy growth of $100,000 in that same year.
“Problem is, it can be tough to wait. It does take a lot of patience to continue contributing to one’s savings during the early years when the gains feel so modest. That’s why some investors look for shortcuts such as speculative stocks. In my opinion, though, ‘shiny objects’ like this are traps. The most reliable path to wealth, in my experience, is to do the hard work of being patient.”
This year has been a brutal one in the financial markets with stock values, along with our retirement account balances, plummeting. How should we respond? Trust in the Lord and remember the “power of patience!”
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