Patience Is A Virtue

I try not to pray for patience anymore.  Last time I prayed for patience, God gave me three kids.  I have learned that God does not just, “Poof”, give you patience when you ask for it – like some supernatural kind of patience where you can sing your way through life’s hard ships.  Oh no, when I pray for patience with my kids, for example, there is instantly screaming, yelling, crashing, crying, hitting, tantrums, spilled cereal, sneezing in the muffin mix that I am trying to make, toothpaste all over the bathroom floor and Cheeto fingers wiped on the couch cushions. And all of this is within the first five minutes of my patience prayer.

I do pray for humor. I pray for a spirit of fun and playfulness to keep up with my three kids. That way I have a great story to share after one of the sick kids sneezes into the muffin mix and then the rest of the family eats the muffins and get sick as well.

All the food on the floor turns into a fun game with the vacuum where I run around and threaten to suck my children into the vacuum cleaner and get to listen to their lovely giggles and allows me to laugh which gets some of my frustrations out as well.

I pray for a spirit of understanding and imagination as my son explains that he just had to jump from the desk to his bed because the carpet was hot lava. Except that he slipped and hit his head on the wooden bed frame, which gave him a gash in his head that needed four staples. And my three year old has to remind his older brother that he is dead now because he fell in the hot lava…hard to argue with the logic of it all.

Through all of this, I see that the reason I don’t magically become patient when I ask for patience, is that I would never truly understand what it means to be patient unless I first went though a situation where patience is needed.

Like the time my daughter swallowed two coins because she didn’t have any pockets. She needed somewhere to hold them while she played. I started to get angry but realized that it made sense  and that it was something I would have done at her age.  So I prayed that the coins would make their journey through her little body safely. And after a week of poop duty, she understood that little kids don’t make good banks.

(sigh)

God give me patience…oh, wait, aah....one of the kids just puked all over my car. I told him not eat all those butter packets. Still, God allows me to be calm and compassionate as I clean up the mess and give my child a bath and then cuddle him later. That will be a funny story one day. Just not today.