What an interesting concept of impatience! I just heard a presentation on Spiritual Discipline for my Christian Counseling class I am taking….I had to stop video to just take 5 minutes to write what sunken into my heart!
The couple in this video is discussing Spiritual Discipline: as a certain practice that enables me to receive power from God to become who He has called me to be. Picture training for something vs. trying to do something. Training is where you arrange your life to accommodate practices to enable you to do what you cannot. Let say you want to enter in a pie eating contestant; you would eat pie every day. In the Bible Paul tells Timothy, “train yourself unto Godliness”. So now that I laid some of the background discussion here is where my thinking, my idea, my perception of gaining patience just expanded….
Dr. Nancy Ortberg, goes on to share how she had 3 kids in 3 ½ years…wait, what another person like me!! That as you could imagine caught my full attention as two out of my three kids are demanding my attention! She is telling of how she would never have listed impatience as an area she needed to work on. Of course as many know that all changes and changed when she had three kids. She began to say that she noticed her impatience by the look in her children’s eyes when she would rush them out of frustration. How many times…no wait let me say…yes, many times I have done this and had this look from the kids that I understand now as hurt.
After accepting that she had impatience and that it was sin, Dr. Ortberg put disciplines and practices to slow her down. She took steps to slow down so she would not feel rushed and therefore get frustrated. SLOW DOWN…how does that seem to fit, it seems backwards but I get it. So what if I accomplish this long list of to do’s and feel accomplished if at the end of the night there is this hurtful look in my kids eyes? Or in my husband’s eyes?
I pray for patience all time but it does take the courage to identify it and pray for solutions. Having discipline invites God off the list and into our hearts! As much as I am trying to explain what just happened in my heart I can’t seem to write it out. I just know that in putting this to practice I will accomplish growth in me.
Slow Down… I get it!
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