Peace Found in Patience (Lisa)

As you continue to do the hard, slow, faith filled work of being patient, I pray these words give you a moment of peaceful meditation.

Dear Patient Loving God,

You made us in Your image, filling us with Your gifts. Patience is just one of many, but this gift does not leave us without a longing still, an aching for an answer, a loneliness, and a weariness. What patience is, is a grace-filled tool that You tucked into our back pocket, to go on, despite all of that.

When we pray, Please Lord God! Give me patience! help us to own the gift that already exists in us. Help us to look back on life, on yesterday, last week and month and all the years that held the most difficult moments, when we had nothing but patience to see it through. Help us to feel the forbearance we carried then and now, that this gracious gift of patience still thrives within us.

Today, help us start by being patient with our own selves. It can be an exhausting business, this life, this thing we do. We are grateful for each day Lord, but we need to find rest, in a peace found amidst all the demands on us. Maybe the work is to find and use the gift of Your peace alongside our patience. You tucked it in our other pocket. Help us reach for it.

Amen

I love the picture above. I hope you can see yourself in it. As I sit in this picture, in that fisherman’s body, I feel the warmth of the sun and the cool water surrounding me. I hear the waves playfully lapping at my feet, close my eyes and my mind sees nothing but water and sky. I find peace in this waiting-moment, peace in the patiently holding-on for something that may be a long time in coming, or may never come at all, peace in the forbearance for myself and others, for a change or an improvement, for hope, for health, for a break, an answer, a lifting, for whatever it is I am waiting on, praying on.

I turned my head and noticed peace and patience sitting side by side, amidst all the hard and weary stuff piled on me, even in the middle of it all, I found I can rest in my peace, another gift from you God, given freely to me for no reason at all, except for the love of me.

I am forever grateful Lord.

Amen