Hope Is the Key to Patience

For Tertullian the singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient, says Tertullian, is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.

Robert Louis Wilken, speaking of the Early 3rd Century Church Father, Tertullian (c. 160-220) in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (Yale, 2003), 284.