Jami on Patience

Any parent of a toddler can tell you that patience comes into play on an everyday basis. It's something I certainly have had to work on. One of the reasons I'm not a teacher is that repeating myself indefinitely drains my patience more than anything. Asking the same question endlessly appears to be one of my son's specialties. But I digress. Today in Sunday School, someone in my class said (and I'm paraphrasing here) that when we lose our patience, what we are doing is showing our real, ugly selves. My first reaction was disagreement - we're not all ugly deep-down, hidden only by this thin veneer of patience. And sometimes I lose my patience and I am instantly sorry - haven't we all done that? How that can be my real self if I am instantly mortified that I've done it? But it's been clunking around in my brain all afternoon, and I'm going to change my stance a bit. It's not our ugly selves, it's the ugly side of ourselves that we all have. Frustration, pain or anger calls to our worst qualities and patience is the skill we have learned to hide those qualities. What the loss of patience reveals is not our "true" selves, but the worst part of ourselves. Excuse the religious reference, but it's my sinful nature showing through. Not what I aspire to be, not a part I nurture or like, but still part of me. Not one of us is born patient; newborns never stop crying because their mothers say "Be right with you!". When Eddie wears down my patience, it's not a failing in Eddie, it's that I haven't acquired the strength of patience required. Like a muscle stretching with work, patience must be practiced to be increased. Maybe this is all obvious to everyone but me. Maybe each reader is thinking "well duh", and I'm just the person who never really pondered the nature of patience. It's a change for me to think stretches on my patience as a chance to exercise, not attacks.