Patience

So generally I have been placing my happy moments on things that haven't really been thoughts or inspiration or spiritual insight, but today is different.  Today I shall share the spiritual insight that has given me pleasure today.  It seems that different times in our lives, our lives seem to focus on different principles of aspects.  For me the most recent one has been patience.  To say the most recent is slightly deceiving since we all know that patience is not a lesson we learn overnight, in fact the word patience screams TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I have been learning patience, or more specifically God has been trying to teach mes patience and I have been a very SLOW learner.  But here comes a portion of the insight I have gained regarding this particular virtue.

I am teaching a class at the university and I am actually a little ahead of my schedule.  While I was thinking about what to do, I felt inspired to provide a real world building example for my next lecture.  So I contacted several friends to see if they could provide me with the necessary drawings.  They responded that they would send me some.  Well I teach in 2 days and I don't have the drawings yet.  Here is where my ah ha of patience comes in.  First I was inspired.  Than I acted upon that prompting and did all I could do. And then I trust God that it will work out in His timetable.  I want to worry, I want to try and "force" the drawings into my lecture notes, but that is not how it works.  Nothing I can do will get them here any sooner.  If God inspired me on how to teach, than I have to trust that He will help me achieve that inspiration.  Often we get mixed up in all we can do and the more than we should do.  We try to think that we can cause a seed to grow by opening it up and yanking out the plant so that we have a fully grown tree just by our forced actions.  In reality, that is NOT how a seed becomes a tree.  All we can do is plant it, water it, give it sunlight, etc. and trust that it will grow.

Patience seems to be a combination of trusting, and doing all we can truly do (not the extreme).   A portion of that trust can be described as faith and obedience. We faithfully obey God and have faith in Him and have faith in what He has promised us, if we keep His commandments He will help us.