Patience...

"Patience, it's a wonderful thing" goes a song that I like.

Indeed, but I can get rather impatient at how difficult it is to grow in this area.

Anyone who knows me can tell you how impatient I can be. If there is something that I want then I can get desperate. This desperation expresses itself unashamedly in the way I rush into things, open packages, even in how I eat and drink.

When I was living in Nicaragua, my parents decided to take us to Disney World for one Christmas vacation. I wanted so much to go there. I wanted to finally visit the United States. I wanted so much to, oddly enough, eat at Mc Donald's (hey I was a little kid bombarded with the creepy Ronald Mc Donald commercials)

And so we decided to get our American visas, a painfully long experience.

I thought the whole enterprise of getting a U.S visa was ridiculous. You would pay $20.00 to get into the embassy (back in those days, now it's like $100), wait in line for like 8 hours, and chances are you will not get one. Good way to spend your day off.

Anyways, midway through the adventure, hungry and desperate, I started to cry. I want to go home! Screw Disney and Mc Donald's!

Wisely, my parents told me that when I get to Disney, I would hardly remember waiting in line.

We finally received our Visas, and indeed, when I was in Disney all the pain that I suffered from the waiting were long forgotten.

Waiting, it's a wonderful thing.

I honestly don't like Waiting, along with its all too clean sister Patience. If it was up to me I would send them both to pound salt!

But waiting it's the only remedy that I know for impatience.

Thanks to God, and the road He has taken me in the last couple of years, I have seen that I've grown a little in this area.

I offer one example to illustrate this.

When I bought my first laptop, my love for electronics and impatience created a powerful synergy, which basically resulted in me opening the package before I got to my house. I booted the thing up while I was driving.

That was 4 years ago.

I just received my new laptop. I ordered it online (Goodness gracious! Oh the horror! Oh the waiting!) It was delayed for a whole week.

When I finally received it and got into the car, I received a not so strong urge to open it. I didn't, even though I wasn't driving this time.

I got home and carefully got the laptop out of its package, plugged it in, set it up, played with it for a while, and then went to Church.

The change seems small, even laughable. But it means a lot to me.

"For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us" Romans 8:18.

I believe Paul. I believe that when I get to the Heavenly "Disney" I will forget all the dreadful waiting that I endured on earth.

Photo Credit: Meddy Garnet.