Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Marshall

Patience gets framed here as muscle, not mood: a discipline you practice, not a virtue you either have or don’t. Peter Marshall’s line works because it quietly demotes the romantic idea of spiritual serenity and replaces it with something closer to training camp. “Teach us” admits the audience’s default setting is impatience; even prayer becomes an instructional plea, not a performance of faith. He’s writing as a clergyman, but he’s also speaking like someone who has watched people white-knuckle their way through uncertainty and call it weakness.

The subtext lands in the comparison that stings: waiting is “often harder than to work.” Work flatters the modern self. It produces visible proof, a story you can tell about your usefulness. Waiting strips you of that armor. It’s forced idleness, the kind that makes you confront what you can’t control: outcomes, other people, illness, grief, the slow churn of history. In a religious frame, it’s also the most inconvenient lesson in providence. If God’s timing is real, then human urgency has to be unlearned.

Context matters: Marshall, a prominent American preacher in the mid-20th century, lived in an era that prized industriousness and moral certainty, yet was shadowed by war and personal fragility (he died young). The prayer doesn’t offer a hack for calm; it offers a diagnosis of why waiting hurts. It hurts because it denies us the illusion that effort guarantees results. That’s why the line still reads like a rebuke to productivity culture dressed in devotional language.