Patience
The old adage is: patience is a virtue. Although at times that may be true, Ryan was right when he said that patience is a muscle. Some of you may have heard my little rhyming adage before, "Patience isn't to wait, it's to tolerate (long-suffering)." Patience is the ability to put up with "it", no matter what "it" happens to be. It's the ability to persevere no matter the circumstances.
We often think of patience in relation to time, thinking in terms of waiting an enduring the passing of moments. Sometimes, though, patience requires us to endure frustrations, annoyances, and anger--until those moments, too, pass.
If this is you. . .pray for patience!
My dad says nobody loses their temper, we make the decision to let it go. When something begins to eat at us, whether it's waiting or frustrating, there's a moment when the annoyance becomes too irritating to continue and we allow ourselves to lose patience. When I'm at the gym, with every exercise there's a maximum weight that I can lift. The more often I life and endure my max, the more that maximum weight that I can lift increases. I persevere and I get stronger! In the same way, the more I put up with and tolerate the things that annoy me, the stronger my patience gets, and things begin to annoy me less.
In the apostle Paul's description of love in 1 Corinthians 13, the first state of mind to which he compares love is patience. In order to love properly, we need to have patience and put up with the things that annoy us. In this world, many things will irritate us, people will bother us, anything and everything can get under our skin. That will always be a constant in life. We still need to love.
The more we apply patience and put up with those frustrations and those things that bother us, the more we build that muscle of patience and the less chance everything will annoy us.
Romans 12:12 says, "Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer," (NIV). If you want to stay patient in your trials, try rejoicing and hope and staying faithful in prayer! You'd be surprised what following the wisdom of the Word can do in your life.
-Josh-