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What is Patience?

Patience is usually perceived as a value related to waiting—the value needed to prevent us from quickly losing our temper when waiting in line, waiting for someone, or simply just to wait without haste. However, on the grander scale, patience is more than just a value; it’s a virtue. Many Christian stories of faith discuss the importance of virtues and how they lead to a path of moral righteousness.

This means that patience is not just about being able to wait but also being able to do so without getting mad, annoyed, or complaining – to wait without haste. Whether it means calmly unbuttoning and buttoning all the buttons of your shirt again after missing a button, extending your patience for someone who constantly screams or insults you, or being patient while waiting for the Lord to answer your prayer of a significant other, patience comes in all forms – both big and small. A person’s kind, respectful, and polite demeanor should not change simply because they are tasked to wait. A person who can do that is a true exemplification of what patience is.

How to Wait Without Haste

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When we think about patience, we usually associate it with dealing with toddlers. Toddlers are loud, irritable, messy, and just hard to care for in general. However, dealing with life situations is similar to the parenting techniques when dealing with toddlers – take a deep breath, ground yourself, and move on.

However, having patience is not just as simple as biting the bullet and not saying anything. It can take time and effort to develop patience, and it usually takes a long time for us to master the art of patience. Thorough this is deemed necessary because of the importance of patience.

Patience always starts with knowing yourself. Do we act irrationally? Do we often look back at our decisions with regret? Learning to wait without haste may seem difficult at first because the realization of a person’s lack of patience is usually preceded by a stage of denial. However, once we can open our eyes to reality, we can learn to act on it. Simple measures like pausing, closing your eyes, and taking a deep breath can help us pause before getting mad and irrational.

Then, we can reflect on ourselves. Is it something worth getting angry about or a waste of our energy? What will we have to gain by acting mean and irritated? Will waiting begrudgingly really make us wait longer? It is easy to succumb to the temptation of losing it when we are faced with tribulations, but once we realize that patience can make a difference in our disposition and overall happiness, we can slowly make that change towards practicing patience in our day-to-day lives, one step at a time.

What is the Importance of Patience?

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Oftentimes, people find having patience more difficult. In our current time, where speed is always king and trumps all, it is difficult for us to keep up with the fast-paced world if all we do is just wait. It can be frustrating to wait without haste when other seemingly menial tasks take up so much time or when dealing with a challenging person or child. 

Better Decision Making

However, from a long-term perspective, patience plays a significant role in helping a person make better decisions, huge life-changing ones. Taking a momentary pause to reassess our decisions will ultimately help us make better ones.

Sometimes, when we get too busy, jumping to conclusions or running after the first thought that pops up is easy. However, because patience is a virtue, it teaches us that patience is crucial for us to grasp our minds on the situations better, to gauge all the possibilities, and to discern what it really is that we want. Decision-making blooms best when we understand and process everything well, which can be dampened by constantly hurrying to do the next thing.

Improve Relationships With Others

We all know that one person in our life is overly persistent, frustrating, or irritable to the point that it gets annoying. Don’t we all dread being that dread that person who just can’t seem to wait without haste? Though this may be already extreme, patience is a fundamental building block in our relationships with others. Ensuring that you accept each other’s shortcomings and weaknesses and allow them room and time to improve is essential to building lifetime relationships with others.

At the end of the day, we always have a choice. Whether we use our free will now to create a world filled with virtues like patience or not, we will eventually reap the fruits of our eternal existence. Read Dr. Julius Mosley II’s Living Life with Blinders On to learn more about this.