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Patience is a virtue. I remember these words from a sentimental Victorian cross stitch that was framed in my Granny’s front room. Later in life they were explained to me as extolling the virtues of delayed gratification – one marshmallow now or two if you could hang on without eating it for fifteen minutes. But when the Tory MP and Afghanistan veteran Tom Tugendhat used the word “patience” in his speech to the House of Commons yesterday, it was without a shred of any sort of domestic home-spun moralising. His words were raw, angry, and focused. Despite the memory of many fallen comrades, which he clearly had seared on his mind, he told the floor that We left Afghanistan too early. We betrayed many good people to a terrible fate. And we did so, he said, because we in the West lacked the necessary patience and resolve. “We know that patience wins,” he said. “The cold war was won with patience. So let’s stop talking about forever wars. Let’s recognise that forever peace is bought not cheaply but hard through determination and the will to endure.” Of course, there will be those who will argue that we have already been there twenty whole years. To which others might well reply - yes twenty, just twenty. That in the great scheme of things, twenty years is not so much. And here, I suspect, we have something of the deeper spiritual value of patience and why it’s always more than a form of self-denial in the face of temptation. One might almost say that the religious imagination is set to think in terms of centuries, whereas the modern secular imagination - with technology continually stimulating a demand for instant gratification – is set to think in terms of minutes, even seconds. And so perhaps those who spend a bit more time with the ancient of days than they do on social media – or indeed with the 24 hour news cycle - will have a temporal frame better adjusted to what Tugendhat calls “the will to endure”. One tiny example. I am currently in the process of negotiating the sale of a parcel of land behind my church on a 999 year lease. The buyer told me the other day he thinks of this as an effective freehold. I, however, explained to him that we expect to be still here when the lease runs out. And that, I suspect, is part of the value that people attach to centuries old churches even when they do not themselves go to church. They speak of human life as being a great deal more than three score years and ten. And I suspect you can only think this way if you believe there is something out there greater than me. As soldiers rightly sing when remembering their fallen comrades: “Oh God our help in ages past, our hope for years to come”