As Always Learn to Develop Patience

It has taken me a long time to develop patience, and I continue to develop it. It might take you a long time too. The only way you develop patience is by going through challenging or tedious efforts.

Patience brings you out on the other side with a sense of achievement and renewed strength. Sometimes to accomplish big changes you have to be patient with the little details: in tedious routines, with challenging people and challenging situations, until you get a breakthrough. Roadblocks and obstacles pop up unexpectedly all the time and sometimes you have to create a different pathway to get to your destination.

Other times you have to wait it out until something is cleared for you. Many times you need divine intervention before you can move through something. Patience gets you through those moments of waiting and not seeing any results. In some things, no matter how hard you try to change something or create something with impact, it doesn’t work out, even though you know that you are supposed to do it and feel an urgency to do it. I have had to learn that things take time, and not necessarily in my time, I have to keep doing what I am doing, and I have to wait for God. You have to keep planting and nourishing your seeds before you see the tiny spouts spring up. You keep taking the steps, and when everything lines up, and all your efforts blossom, then you will be in the middle of an exquisite garden to bask in.

You need patience in many matters: family, friends, the Elderly, children, love and relationships, jobs, schoolwork, doing something creative like singing, writing or painting, making money, paying debts, starting a family, teaching someone, listening to your inner voice, meditating, fulfilling a dream.

Things like these always require patience and endurance. If you give up too quickly you may never receive what you really want. Sometimes you have to be in the right place at the right time, and you have to wait for everything to line up. There could be one element that is missing that you don’t know about, but God knows that it is missing. Patience is the preparation of a task, the doing and completing of all the details, the waiting and follow through, and then waiting some more.

It is doing all the tedious, boring and overly complicated things that will make a something go smoothly, and if necessary doing them over and over again each day and every day until something changes, or you are led by the Holy Spirit to change something, or add something new to what you are doing.

Whatever you are building, it takes time and effort. First you excavate, then dig, then create a foundation, then the skeleton framework; then you begin to fill inside the structure, build up, and add the finishing touches; then you use and work with what you have built, and you invite others to share it. That effort could take a small amount of time or it could take a lifetime. Either way, it is the living of it moment by moment that creates the life. You don’t wait for your life to happen; life is lived by what moment presents itself next. How you deal with each moment is all up to you by the choices that you make. Choices require patience, too.

We all need to have patience with ourselves. Let yourself develop into the person that you want to be, and let yourself be what you really want to become. One day you will have developed a tremendous amount of patience, and you will be able to master yourself and handle each moment intuitively.

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