Love is patient

Before I start pontificating, let me confess that patience is not one of my long suits. I want everything yesterday whether it be from my spouse, my kids, my grand kids, waitress, checker, or even God. I guess it comes from the "microwave" society we live in. Everything happens instantly (if you don't believe it try keeping up with the price of gas). So today I am speaking as much to me as to you. In fact, in all my blogging, God has me say what I need to hear. And, boy, do I need today's blog.

Why do you suppose that the first thing listed in the definition of love is patience? I have been doing a lot of thinking and reading on the matter and I think there are there are three reasons why patience would come first,

The first reason is that we were created as humans to grow and mature. Just because you marry someone does not mean they will grow up instantly. You can't just add water and poof, you have Prince Charming. You can't marry someone to change them. That's God's job and sometimes we as women get in God's way of maturing our husbands by enabling their bad behavior (If I just love him enough, he will change. Yeah, right.) We have to give one another time to mature and discover how a mature person acts (I'm not sure I have figured that out yet and I'm 52!)

The next reason is that we are sinful creatures in need of forgiveness. When I mess up (which I do frequently and big time), we need to know that those that love us will forgive us. Jesus told us that we were to forgive one another 70 x 7. That's a lot of forgiving. Please don't misunderstand me here. You can forgive someone and not continue to subject yourself to abusive behavior (that's a subject for another time.) To forgive someone is to release their control over you and transfer that control to God to do whatever it takes to turn them into what HE wants them to be.(Did you get that? What HE wants them to be not what ME wants them to be.)

Finally, He wants us to be patient so that we can learn to trust Him instead of ourselves. Let me give you an example. My husband laughs at me every summer because I will continue to water what he calls "dead things". Those are plants that have died back to the roots and most people would probably pull them out and start over. But I just can't seem to do that. I have to water and care for a plant a year before I will pronounce them dead (Go ahead and laugh. All my friends do.) You know, a funny thing usually happens in the spring of the next year. Those same plants that have been pronounced "dead" the past summer, begin to come up from the roots and start to flourish. You see, they weren't dead after all; they just looked dead.

That's the way love is sometimes. It may look dead. It may look dead for a whole season. But we must be patient to wait for the life to come back. My spouse and I went through some terrible troubles for the first 13 years of our marriage. We both thought we had done irreparable damage to our love for one another. We'd both seen lawyers and were on the verge of calling it quits. But God just wouldn't let me do it. He kept telling me to wait (wait for it, wait for it). I waited through nine months of separation and then another six months while he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. I got TIRED of waiting. I wanted some closure and I wanted it NOW (remember, I told you patience was not one of my virtues).

However, I did wait and God did a miracle for us. He healed all the hurt, anger, and just general disgust in both are hearts and healed our marriage. He did what all the counseling couldn't do. He taught us to forgive. Granted, it took us 15 months to learn, but the important part is that we did learn and are still married today because we exercised patience.

So practice with me on being a little more patient today. It's hard. In fact, it's VERY hard. But the payoff is miraculous if we are only patient enough to "wait for it."