Patience.
As my mom likes to say, "Patience? I'm not a doctor. I don't have patience."
This always makes me laugh. 🤣
But the reality is that patience requires waiting, and waiting is so hard sometimes. You wait too long, and your spirit begins to hurt; you don't wait, and your whole life could hurt. Patience is built with time; they go hand in hand.
There's a story I read about two doors and the importance of patience:
There were once two doors in the same house. One was a beautiful living-room door, and the other was just an ordinary bathroom door.
What they had in common was that they both led awful lives. The house was full of naughty children who were always slamming and kicking the doors. Each night, when everyone was asleep, the doors would talk about their miserable fortune.
The living-room door was always sick and tired, ready to explode with anger, but the bathroom door would calm him down, saying, "Don't worry, it's normal. They're children; they'll soon learn. Put up with it a little longer, and you'll see that things will improve."
And so the living-room door would calm down for a while. But one day, after a big party and innumerable slammings and kickings of the doors, the living-room door finally lost it, saying, "OK. That's enough! The next time someone slams me, I'm going to break, and they'll learn a thing or two."
This time, he did not listen to the bathroom door, and the next day, the first time he was slammed, the living-room door broke. This caused a great rumpus in the house, and the children were warned to be more careful. This filled the living-room door with satisfaction. Finally, he was tasting sweet revenge.
However, after the first few days of this, the owners of the house got tired of the inconvenience of having a broken door. Instead of repairing the door, they decided to replace it. The old door was removed and thrown outside, next to the trash.
There lay the beautiful living-room door, regretting what it had done. Not being able to put up with things for just a little longer, it now found itself discarded, waiting to be turned into sawdust. Meanwhile, his friend, the ordinary bathroom door, remained in its place, and the children were treating it with greater care.
Fortunately, the living-room door did not end up as sawdust. Instead, a very poor man found him amongst the rubbish, and although the door was broken, the man knew that this door was the best he would be able to find for his poor house. The door, in turn, was happy to have the chance to be a proper door again and to graciously accept the discomforts of a job as hard as being a door.
Patience paid off for the bathroom door as he hung on his hinges, swinging open and closed, doing just what he was created to do, and now with gentleness and care from the children.
The living room door lost his patience; he snapped, literally, and lost his place. He was tossed out, discarded, and considered rubbish in the eyes of the home owners. Because he lost his patience, his emotions took over and anger burned in him, causing him to break; he became damaged and unusable in his current state.
If you lose your patience, it's okay; it means you are human, so long as it doesn't happen often. If it does, then you need to check yourself.
Patience is learned through adversity. Without a situation to cause you to be in a hurry and test your patience, you would never be able to learn to control and grow your level of patience.
"It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience." Julius Caesar
Remember, you don't have to be a doctor to have patience.
Comments