Jimbo's Jots

patience – [ˈpāSHəns] – the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.

“Every day is a pain to live!” “How can you say God is working in my life when I can’t see him working?” “You don’t know what it’s like on a daily basis to be with my children. They don’t listen, even when I yell at them.” “I just want to know now how it will turn out.”

Here in lies the problem. We live in an “instant gratification” society. We drive through and eat in our cars! We can google any subject and within seconds, we see a listing of just about anything related to that topic. I just googled “patience” – at the time of this printing, there were 28,100,000 possible items related to patience.

We expect this as parents too, instant gratification. Maybe this will help . . . there are two children. The older boy, 6 years old, has hit and pushed the younger brother, 3 years old. The reason? The younger brother took a toy. So he is left in tears and you run in to resolve the conflict by yelling at the older boy. You possibly send him to his room or take away the toys for a short time. This resolves the problem for today . . . until it happens again two weeks later.

This time, upon confronting the older sibling again, you say something like, “Didn’t we just talk about this last week?” And he knows you did.

The problem is we feel we can solve the issue with just conversation. Parenting, like living regular life, is like having a never-ending conversation. It’s going to take some time and patience to help our children understand what we trying to say.

Maybe the Wise King wasn’t so far off when he says, “Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.” (Ecclesiastes 7:8, English Standard Version)

Be blessed and be a blessing!