Patience: The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.
I am an extremely impatient person, in every aspect. I always want to be ahead of everyone, and rush into things. I don’t like waiting for things to happen. The sad part is that I still haven’t learned to be patient with everything I’ve gone through in the past twenty years of my life. As hard as I try, I always end up frustrated and beating myself up for not getting something in the timing I want. I’ve prayed for God to give me patience, but I’ve learned that if you ask for patience, you won’t just get it one day to another. You will face situations to help teach patience. I’ve had to face a lot of those, and most of the time it feels like I’ve failed.
The good thing is that I’ve been blessed with Juan, who is by far the most patient person I know. Whenever I get impatient and frustrated about something, he just looks at me and gives me a crooked smile, probably thinking how he ended up with such a monster. I’m kidding, he would never think that, but I look at him and I ask myself why he doesn’t get impatient with me when I am impatient. Not that I don’t want him to be patient with me, but how does he do it? Juan says he used to be a very angry person as a teenager, and at that age, who wasn’t, right? The crazy thing though is that I have only seen him angry once in the past three years and a half since we have been together. When I asked him how he did it he just said, “I asked myself why I was so angry, it wouldn’t change or help. If anything, my anger made things worse. I decided I wasn’t going to waste my time being angry.” What he said really made sense, and it changed my perspective on the things I wanted to better myself in.
I believe that God gives each of us different strengths and weaknesses to help each other. If I ask God for patience, he will give me the chance to learn it through different circumstances. I also know that because he understands it won’t be easy, he gives us people whose strengths are our weaknesses. Juan’s strength is my weakness, which balances us out. If I was in a relationship with someone who was just as impatient, if not more impatient than me, we wouldn’t be happy. We’d get stuck and we would have no way to rely on one another if we were to both be in the same situation.
Like I said before, I haven’t been able to learn patience, yet. I am not ashamed though, because when I finally get to that point, I will be proud of myself and probably surprised as well. I think my patience is put to the test almost every day. For almost three years I have worked in a call center, in the customer service department. My job has been a blessing, and probably another big way for me to learn patience. If you have ever worked in a place like that, you would know how much patience that job requires. It’s not easy, but it has taught me a lot. There are days when I test myself and try to see how long it takes for me to get impatient with the person on my line. Most days it goes well, but there are always going to be some bad days. Those days are the ones where I end up so exhausted that I feel like giving up. Then I remind myself that I must do this, and I give myself no choice than to start clean the next day.
Patience is my weakness, and I’ve learned to recognize that. I am working on it, and hope to one day have enough patience to be a good wife, a mother, a boss, anything I want to be. We all have different weaknesses, and if we take it one day at a time, I believe that with enough practice, those weaknesses could turn out to be our strengths. Every day is like a clean white page, a new opportunity. That’s what I tell myself when I feel like I’ve failed. If you feel the same way I do about patience, let’s remember together that we shouldn’t always try to be patient with things, or with others, but most importantly to be patient with ourselves first.
Sincerely,
Heidi