There Are Both Benefits And Pitfalls To Developing Patience
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(OPINION) My dad, a minister of the gospel for 60 years, used to tell parishioners there was one thing they should never pray for: patience.
“Tribulation worketh patience,” he’d say, quoting St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. “Anytime you ask the Lord for patience, you might as well be praying for trouble.”
Kidding aside, many of us actually could do with more patience: patience with our lot in life and, especially, patience with our fellow humans.
The New Testament extols patience as a virtue. But you don’t need to be a Bible thumper to agree that if you’re going to get through this world without developing ulcers and chronic tension headaches, you’re going to need a healthy dose of patience.
Events frequently don’t unfold as we’d like them to, and even the good things that do come our way usually don’t arrive on our schedule. Plus, the people around us at home and work and church regularly prove disappointing and exasperating.
It’s a big world, full of frustrations. Worse, most of those frustrations are out of our hands. Usually we didn’t cause them and can’t fix them and can’t even hurry them along their way. We just have to wait them out. That’s what patience is for.
If you scrimped and saved to pay $100,000 of your own hard-earned money for your kid’s college education, and then at the end of those four years he decides he doesn’t really like working and instead intends to hobo around the country for a decade finding himself, you know what? There’s not a blessed thing you can do about it.
You’re going to have to develop patience or else drive yourself, your spouse, your shrink and your kid mad.
Patience is a virtue I won’t pretend to have mastered. But I’ve thought a lot about it. I’ve intentionally worked at it. And I hope I’m better at it today than I used to be.
So, I’ll share a few of my thoughts on the subject. My observations might or might not apply to you. Obviously, feel free to ignore what I say, with my blessings.
It seems my own impatience usually is about two things: discomfort and ego.
I find myself the most impatient when I’m in a situation I hate — a traffic jam, a touchy conflict at church, a dispute with an insurance company. The more I don’t like it, the more eager I become to escape it, until in the worst of cases I can hardly concentrate on anything else.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this, but in 2005, in a paroxysm of sheer madness, I bought a bunch of apartments and went into the rental business, looking to make my fortune.
Within months I realized I was as unsuited for that job as any person could possibly be. There wasn’t a thing about landlording I was good at. I dreaded getting up in the morning, knowing I had to deal with repairs and deadbeat tenants and taxes and the rest. I was about as uncomfortable as I’ve ever been. It was awful.
So I put my apartments on the market — where they stayed for 12 solid years. I went through a series of real estate agents. The apartments just wouldn’t sell.
The situation was not only uncomfortable; it was a double whammy to my self-esteem. I’d made a bad business decision to start with, and I wasn’t smart enough to get out of it.
Finally, a dozen years in, I gave up. I reconciled myself to passing the rest of my life as a landlord. I made peace with it. Sort of.
I took the apartments off the market. Then — bam! — from nowhere, two buyers materialized, one for each of the complexes I owned. The properties sold within eight days of each other.
It felt like a God thing. Still, I could hardly give thanks. When I’d pray, the only words I could find were, “Lord, don’t think I’m not grateful, but if you could sell those apartments that easily, you might’ve done it 12 years ago!”
I wanted my apartments to sell when I wanted them to sell, which turned out not to be when others were interested in buying them. Every day, even now, I want people to do what I think they ought to do, exactly when I think they ought to do it.
What I keep relearning — not just with apartments but with a thousand other matters — is that it’s not my world. I live in it, but I’m not the boss of it. I’m only along for the ride.
A lot of learning patience, then, is about squashing my own ego. I come to accept that people will do what they want to do. Their doings may or may not conform with my druthers. Similarly, God will move in his timing, not mine.
Things will turn out OK in the end, probably. Or they won’t. Either way, I should quit pushing, since the results aren’t up to me.
In the meantime, I’d do well to just take each day as it’s given to me, look for its beauty and deal with its troubles and try not to fret about my ridiculous expectations. I’d do well to trust that somebody else is in control, and he’s likely better at the job than I am.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.