Good (or God) Gives Us Patience
I can’t say enough good things about having faith, obviously, or I would not be writing this blog. The most important thing I have received from having faith, other than the belief that one way or another things will work out, is patience.
We live very short-tempered lives these days, and I think we all know why. It’s easy to expect lightning fast results when AI has arrived and it has the answer to every question we might possibly ask. It’s easy to get impatient when there is a gas pedal, an airplane, or waitstaff in a restaurant ready to bring us anything we want. It’s easy to keep demanding more when the human brain seems capable of just about everything.
While in many ways we have made our lives much easier, in others, we have made ourselves much more miserable. It took embracing and cultivating faith to really understand just how long our lives really are, just how long it takes to build a career, just how long it takes to develop trust and fall in love, just how long it really takes to be part of a family or maintain a friendship or build a skill or be part of a community.
For all the capabilities of our lightening fast brains, life is terribly slow moving, and only faith has helped me enjoy playing the long game. Malcolm Gladwell once wrote that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something, which seems somewhat daunting until you realize the average human lifespan is 640,000 - 650,000 hours long. Ten thousand hours is a drop in the bucket by comparison, and just think how much more enriching it might be living with expertise that we can provide to others!
I never had any patience until I had faith. I always had somewhere I needed to be. I always had the solution to everything (ha. ha. ha.). I always had a conclusion I needed to jump to, and an assumption I couldn’t help but make about a person or a situation.
Only faith has stayed my hand, body, and brain from rushing from one problem to the next as if I had all the solutions and understood everything while wreaking havoc and solving one problem while creating three more. I am much more willing to take a deep breath (or 10), say a prayer, and see how something plays out before I choose to get involved mind, body, or spirit.
Don’t get me wrong, I still get impatient. I still get a little chippy behind the wheel. I still irritate myself and others on occasion. But I am much less reactive and much more responsive, because I know that Good (or God) works with me if I work with faith.
So, the next time you feel like you have to have all the answers or only you can solve a problem or all other people are idiots, might I recommend a few deep breaths, some prayer, and meditation as an alternative? You might just be surprised by what happens next.