Patience is a virtue - we've all heard that many times. Yet, I feel that though we "know" patience is important, it remains one of life's greatest lessons. In this day and age of gratification, it sometimes seems that patience is a forgotten commodity. It is somewhat like the joke that goes "God grant me patience, and give it to me right away."
Patience is derived from an old English word meaning solitaire. The English men used to become impatient and frustrated. The game became known as patience because it took a lot of it to play the game successful. The bible uses this word a lot to describe faith. “To have faith, you have to have patience”, Father Roe always preached to our small Arago Catholic Church.
I feel that the word patience is a synonym with faith. To have patience is to have faith, whether it be in ourselves, in our peers, or in life in general. For example, when a child is learning to talk, even though we may not understand a sound they're saying, at first, we have patience or faith, that someday they will be able to speak clearly and be understood. In the same way, when we are working on a project, we have patience that it will work out and that we will be successful in completing the goal we have set. Yet there are times when we give up, we lose faith and we lose patience with ourselves and with others.
Sometimes we are impatient for something to end, and sometimes for something to begin. We are impatient for tomorrow to come; we are impatient for the weekend, for a promotion, for a raise, for a new job, for our date to arrive, for our date to leave, and so on. It seems that there are always reasons to be impatient.
If we look at the reasons for our impatience, they always show that we are not happy with what we have going for us now. We want something other than that we have now. While that is not necessarily bad, because after all, it is good to have a dream of a better life for ourselves, but to do so at the cost of not living and loving...