The Gift of Patience
Wednesday Wisdom: The Gift of Patience.
I’ve heard so many people talk about the need for patience in the last few days that I took it as a sign for what to focus today’s blog post on. One person shared with me about feeling hurt from a disagreement with a friend, and how the healing process was asking her to be patient. Another person shared with me about the need to be patient with her students who were lacking motivation. And I am noticing how I am needing patience with myself as I deeply mourn the recent loss of my mother.
Patience. We all need it: with ourselves, with each other, in our work places, in our families, and in our communities.
The Advent season is about being patient, and about waiting, but with a joyful anticipation for something new to be born. In the darkness, something is being created, and remembering this gives us hope.
I share this excerpt from a poem about waiting:
Patient Trust
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1881-1955)
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.
–To read the whole poem click here.
Yet, patience takes practice. I like the children’s book, Waiting is Not Easy!, by Mo Willems. My students love it! Gerald, who is an elephant, has to wait all day for a big surprise, and goes through lots of feelings and thoughts while he’s waiting. “Is it time?” he keeps asking. And his friend, Piggy, keeps saying, “Not yet.” Until finally the day is over, the surprise has arrived, and the night sky is full of twinkling stars, a beautiful sight that gives Gerald so much joy.
This Advent season, as the days get shorter, and the darkness lengthens, what is asking for your patience? What might be growing in the darkness, and asking for your hope?
