If it be possible, as much
as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.
In the movie Evan Almighty, Morgan Freeman, who plays God, asks, “Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient?” Certainly this is an appropriate question. We will never be aware of, exercise, or grow our patience if God does not allow for situations to arise for us to practice patience.
I think we can all agree that go knows u pretty well. In fact, He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows just how much to stretch us, push us, bother us, to bring us to the limits of our patience and just beyond. While sometimes things seem to us to be unduly stressful, Yahweh, by allowing these things, means to make us stronger. He has to tear that patience line just a little bit so that it grows back stronger than before. It is the same way that lifting weights build our muscles. We push our muscles to the limit and just beyond, creating little tears in the muscle. Our bodies recognize the problem and create more muscle cells to strengthen the weakened area, thus we become stronger with bigger and more defined muscle.
Sometimes I think God has a sense of humor about it. While we may not think it initially funny, when we look back at some of our impatience, we can see how silly it was. It was that day were were running just a bit behind, and God placed that little old lady out in front of us in traffic driving 10 mph below the speed limit and we just can’t seem to get around. Oh, the faces we made in that car! Hahaha! Or how about that person with two overloading shopping carts who got the next spot in line ahead of you at the grocery store when you only had 3 items?
Sometimes our patience gets tested for endurance. The Lord may just place the most annoying, stupid backwards idiot of a person on your job that you end up having to work with day after day, month after month, year after year. They don’t like your politics, they don’t like your beliefs, they are jealous of how well you do your job and they seem to go out of their way just to annoy you personally. It takes all you can muster to not slap the coworker upside the head and tell them to get right.
Most of the time, our impatience tells us something about ourselves. It may expose our selfishness. Often time we are only concerned with what we have to do and have no consideration of what others may be going through. That slow driving little old lady may be driving slow because she is sick and driving herself to the doctor because she has no one in her life to take her. We often have no idea or concern about the plight of others, only our own selfish needs.
Next time you start losing your patience, examine yourself and why it is you are losing your patience. Is it merely you having a tantrum because things are not going the way you want them?
James 1: 2 My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations;
3 Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience.
4 But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing.
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