I just got about three solid hours of sleep, from what would be 6pm to 9pm my normal time zone. I was so tired after my day's travels to the East coast, that when my event wrapped up at 9pm local, it dawned on me that it was midnight my time. That seemed like a good explanation for why I was so tired, besides a stressful day of travels, and meeting tons of strangers, and it didn't occur to me until shortly before I went to sleep that I had miscalculated. It was 6pm back home, not midnight. Oh well, going to bed early will help me get up early, and get on East coast time. It turns out not, since I am now wide awake, and more refreshed than usual, at 1am local time. That is a bit earlier than I had in mind. I usually make a point of not posting on here after midnight, to discourage my work on here from cutting in on my sleep. When traveling, I try to adapt that rule to local time, but in this case, I went to bed before midnight local, and am posting before midnight PST, so here we are.
I have been planning to do a post about patience, which relates a bit. I think I have discussed that in the past, and how patience is hard to define, and sort of an illusion. Situations that involve waiting can be seen to involve patience, regardless of how gracefully we respond to them. Usually that is not an issue for me, in that responding to setbacks and waiting are not sources of other problems for me. But that has not been very true the last two of three months. So I made the mistake last week of praying for patience, and not only that, but had other people pray for patience for me. It seemed appropriate, in that patience has been lacking in my response to situations recently, which is unusual for me. This applies to both long term struggles and immediate ones like something dropping or breaking. But there are many accounts out there of people praying for patience, and being blessed with a deluge of new opportunities to practice patience, which is kind of the reverse of what I am looking for. So due to that trend, I recognized long ago that I didn't want to be praying for patience. God actually answers prayers far more than most people recognize, just not necessarily in the ways that they originally anticipated.
But that wasn't on my mind at Bible study the other day. The first time it came up, I was being prayed for, and hadn't come up with any specific requests beyond safe travels on my upcoming trip. Mid way through being prayed for by the group, I recognized how much a lack of patience appeared to be contributing to a number of the issues I was dealing with. How one responds in this situation demonstrates how much freedom they walk in, in a given environment. Do you interrupt the prayer in progress to add that to the list, or keep your mouth shut, and pray for it yourself? God hears what I am thinking either way, but I had interrupted a prayer the previous week at my other church group, for a different reason, which was still unusual for me, but had probably been a good thing. In this case I kept it to myself, until I was being prayed for again by my other group a few days later. I didn't think much of it until they started referencing the potential folly of praying for patience in their verbal prayers for me. At that point I did interrupt, for a slight clarification on what I was looking for. I had no shortage of opportunities to practice patience, I was just looking for the grace to handle those situations better, specifically a return to the way I used to be able to handle them.
Anyhow, I haven't had any shortage of opportunities to practice patience since then, and anticipate many more during a loosely planned trip with many variables to balance. Just between landing and getting to the hotel, I had to spend an hour dealing with a "bold faced lie" from the rental car company (their term for it, not mine), the poorly signed tool booths on the highway, and the outrageous parking situation of a hotel situated directly next to a major theme park. And now I am wide awake to 1am, "patiently" waiting to get some more sleep. Only three more weeks to go, before I have to adjust back to Pacific time.
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