Patience Is Love

Patience is a learned virtue.  When I was very young, I didn’t have any patience.  I wanted everything, and wanted it NOW!  As life went on, I learned patience through resignation.  There were some things you just can’t have instantly.  Life teaches us through its roadblocks.  As early as elementary school, we are taught to get into a line. Lines by their very nature teach patience because you have to wait.  Like most people, I hate lines.  It’s a waste of time to get something you should be able get in a few minutes.  As we get older, lines extend to our vehicles.  Waiting in traffic is an incredible waste.  On more than one occasion the thought had crossed my mind that if all these people were dead, I’d be home by now.

Life is short and I don’t like wasting it by waiting on line.  Most people try to redeem the time by bringing along a book or an iPod, so if they have to wait, they are at least doing something they like.

Over the years, I guess I’ve resigned myself to the reality that you just have to wait for some things, and it doesn’t upset me to be late, or to have to wait.  It’s just a part of life.  This doesn’t mean I’ve become patient, only that I surrendered to the unchangeable.

The thing I still need to work on is patience with people.  I know people are complicated, and I know they come with their individual issues, and I need to be patient with people’s physical limitations, mostly because it’s who they are and it’s not their fault.

Some people are easier to be patient with than others.  When someone is being a jerk, I don’t want to be patient with them.  I just want to get them on their way so they are out of my life.  I’ve endured obnoxious people all my life, and I just don’t want to spend my life catering to their bad behavior.  More often than not, the feeling is mutual, so it’s not a problem.

A bigger problem is loved ones.  It was hard for me to become patient with my mom.  She’s one of the most kind people I know, but as she has gotten older, I became impatient with her failing memory.  I would have to repeat the same things over and over.  It hurt me because I remembered when her memory was good, and I didn’t want to accept her new situation.  At one point, my mom told me she knows her memory is failing, and its scaring her.  It broke my heart to think that my mom was scared of anything.  I started to think about all the times when I was a child and asked my mom to read me a story over and over. She didn’t get upset and say that we already read it. She patiently read them over and over.  It was now my time to become patient with her.  I listen to her stories over and over, and answer her questions over and over, because I love her.  She’s the same person she always was, but needs extra understanding in this area.  My grandmother had the same problem, but we sat and listened to her, because we loved her.  After she passed away, I missed listening to her telling her stories.  Someday, I’ll miss my mom’s stories, so I want to be around to listen to her tell them, instead of regretting that I didn’t when she wanted me to listen.

Patience is an expression of love, which is why the Scriptures teach us to practice it.  It’s not as important to do as much as I can with the least amount of waiting, as it is to have treated people well along the way.

Patience: What We Admire In Others

I’ve heard Patience defined, not as the ability to wait, but the ability to wait with a good attitude. Patience is a wonderful thing, but no one wants to have it for themselves. We want other people to be patient. The value in patience is that we get to see events unfold and we can gain deeper understandings. Patience is something that is learned. It doesn’t come naturally.

I grew up in Metropolitan New York City. Patience is not a virtue there. Getting out of someone’s way is a virtue. The expression, “In a New York Minute,” is not an exaggeration. The New York culture expects everything to be done instantaneously. The real issue for me was speed. When I was a teen, I wanted everything done now. There was no such thing as waiting and patience.

I learned patience years later when I lived in Chicago in the 1970s. I was still driving like a New Yorker, which fared well for me in the Windy City. The bad part was that such driving, at best, is extremely rude. If someone was in my way, I tended to ride their bumper, honk my horn, and do whatever it took to get them out of my way. I’m sure my blood pressure was going through the roof. Usually, people got out of my way, and I got to go where I wanted to go the eight seconds sooner than I would have if I had been patient.

On this one particular day, the sun had just set, there was a lot of rush hour traffic, and a car in front of me was taking way too long in my opinion to merge onto the expressway. I started honking my horn and riding their bumper, in an attempt to get the person to move. Just before I was about to roll down my window and “encourage” the driver to take a driving class, the lights from oncoming traffic illuminated the rear window of the car in front of me. I saw that it was an old lady, and it was easy to see she was scared to death, and I was the one who scared her. I was horrified that I was behaving so badly. It went against my basic values to treat anyone that way. I immediately backed off, but more than that, I was so deeply effected that I changed the way I drove and the way I related to other people. It is my belief that if I am living my life as a living sacrifice, people should be seeing not me, but the life of Yeshua in me. The way I was acting made it impossible for anyone to see Yeshua in me.

Our attitudes are not just what comes out when we feel strongly about something. We have the ability to control how we react to situations around us. You don’t have to behave badly when you get mad. You don’t have to lose control. One of the Fruits of the Spirit is self-control. if we are really living a life that is sacrificial to God, a life of Torah, self-control should be evident in us. The real question is not simply sitting on our emotions until we eventually explode. The real question is how do we wait with a good attitude? The more you consider that your life is in God’s hands, and that what you have is not based on your ability to grab, but in the kindness and sovereignty of God, the less anxiety you will have about getting where you want and what you want before someone else grabs it. You are then free to act in kindness, and let others go first.

Its more important to me that I treat people well, than to grab what I want at the expense of others. Who’s life are you living out? Your’s or Yeshua’s?

also posted in Riverton Mussar: A Wellspring For Ethical Change