A patient person shows great understanding, but a quick-tempered one promotes foolishness. (Proverbs 14:29)
The worst part of life is waiting. The best part of life is having someone worth waiting for. While I find it easy to be patient in some circumstances, I find it difficult in others. The most difficult is patience when it comes to romantic love but I have ready that the more we learn to love, the greater our capacity to demonstrate patience toward other people. It has been 10 months since I was in a romantic relationship and I am trying hard to place my complete trust and faith in God in this matter. I am trying to be patient in this because I love this person very much. They say patience brings an internal calm during a storm while impatience causes us to overact in angry, foolish and regrettable ways. If we can be patient, we can respond in a positive way to a negative situation. It helps us be slow to anger.Anger toward what we thing is a wrongful action only produces new wrongs. If we are patient, however, we can stop this from happening. We can take a breath and clear the air. Patience helps us act with wisdom and doesn't rush to judgment, deciding instead to listen to what another person is saying.
Patience in a relationship helps us give our partner permission to be human. All of us make mistakes and have imperfections. Deciding to be patient gives our mate more time than we think they deserve to correct it. In tough times, patience is what gives the ability to hold on instead of giving in to the pressure and bailing out.
I made mistakes in this last relationship that I have had time to reflect on. I took patience a little too far, if patience is what it was. So many times I would not take any action on something thinking it would all work out. But the same problems came back and so I would agree to take action and once again would sit back thinking it would work out. As you know, that doesn't work. It was a repeating cycle until my partner had enough and left. I guess their patience level was depleted and I wasn't going to make the changes I needed to make.
Patience is the gift of another chance, the promise we will wait this out for as long as it takes. During this lenten season, I hope as we reflect inward, we can give and receive the gift of patience.
Love is Kind
Make a clean break with all cutting, backbiting, profane talk. Be gentle with one another, sensitive. Forgive on another as quickly and thoroughly as God in Christ forgave you.
Kindness is love in action. Love makes us kind and kindness makes us likable. People want to be around you when you are kind. They see you not only good to them but good for them. Kindness is contagious. When someone is kind to us, we want to do the same thing in return. A person who is loving and mature won't always wait to respond to kindness. They would rather be the first to show it.
If someone asked me if I was a kind person, I would of course say yes, today I am. In the not so distant past, I would not answer yes to that question. I carried a lot of anger around and I can honestly say where there is anger, kindness cannot exist. I have always been a sarcastic person and I am not sure why but this sarcasm would carry over into my personal relationship with my partner. I would get snippy with my response to a question, come home from work and spend time doing other things but not engage in communication. How was this being kind? And when things started going down hill in the relationship because of my attitude and lack of action, kindness to anyone was the last thing on my mind. But that is not how God wants us to be. I figured out I didn't love myself as a person and it wasn't until my breakup that I was able to figure that out. I couldn't love others, or be kind to them, because I didn't like myself. How could I expect my partner to continue loving me when I wasn't acting loving in return?
Using this time of Lent to reflect on this, I remembered the Bible verse of 2 Corinthians 5:17 - Whoever is a believer in Christ is a new creation. The old way of living has disappeared. A new way of living has come into existence.
Thankfully I feel different today than I did many, many months ago. I like who I am, I love myself and wish I would have known and acted this way years ago. Maybe I would have been the person my ex-partner deserved.
In Kindness
Author: Anne Marie Cline
Kindness speaks the words,
Your heart could never speak.
Your wings hold me up,
And give me strength when I am weak.
The warmth of your protection,
Brings music to my heart.
You open up the doors,
You show me where to start.
May God bless us in our quest for love and help us to be patient and kind in our relationships with others.
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