Patience with God?

I haven't paid much attention to the "new atheism" or to rebuttals thereof.  I should, I suppose; I am surrounded, in my household and in my circle of friends, by people who profess either no belief or no interest in God.  But I have, you know, my own rather large issues with God.  Mine are about who, rather than whether, God is, and they seem to take up a great deal of my time.  So I generally leave the whether to those who have the energy and inclination for it. 

This morning, however, I read a review of a book that makes me want to investigate a bit.  The book is Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us by Czeck theologian Tomáš Halík, about which Ben Myers says:

"His argument is that the real difference between faith and atheism is patience. Atheists are not wrong, only impatient. They want to resolve doubt instead of enduring it. Their insistence that the natural world doesn't point to God (or to any necessary meaning) is correct. Their experience of God's absence is a truthful experience, shared also by believers. Faith is not a denial of all this: it is a patient endurance of the ambiguity of the world and the experience of God's absence. Faith is patience with God. Or as Adel Bestavros puts it (in the book's epigraph): patience with others is love, patience with self is hope, patience with God is faith."

Read the whole review here.