Enjoying the Journey While Practicing Patience
QUESTION: How’s your patience? Webster says patience is the ability to remain calm, tolerant, and even-tempered while waiting, enduring difficulties, or facing frustration without becoming annoyed or anxious. Patience often requires self-restraint…but do we ever master it?
Hmm!!!
The Bible describes patience, or endurance, as a Fruit of the Spirit, a vital aspect of faith, and a necessary trait for enduring trials and maintaining godly relationships. It involves actively trusting God’s timing rather than reacting in anger and finding strength through hope.
As full-time travelers, we have often encountered situations that required patience. Traffic, doctor visits, waiting in long lines, and our stint in Kentucky after our wreck in 2024 — all of these were issues out of our control that required self-restraint and patience.
But do we really have it???
Have you ever questioned your own strength in terms of self-control and patience? How many times have you given up just before the blessing because you couldn’t wait any longer? How often have you changed your mind about a situation just before it turned around for your good? How many times have you said, “If I had only waited a little longer”!!! Well, we've all done it. It’s part of human nature.
We kick that rock down the road for a little while, then just stop kicking and walk past it because it’s not landing where we want it to!
Our lives are so complex, certain situations can be so overwhelming, and what do we do…we lose hope and forget our faith. Many of us grew up learning about the Fruit of the Spirit… Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV): Love, Joy, Peace, Forbearance or (PATIENCE), Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self-Control. These fruits are paramount in the Christian walk, but they are also important to our everyday interactions with everything we encounter. The saying that patience is a virtue is true.
Patience is produced through trials that develop character, endurance, and hope. It is not passive waiting; we may not always receive what’s promised, but active trust and endurance in God’s timing are the keys. I guess you could say there’s a learning curve to patience; it’s something we need to practice every day. We need to learn to show grace to people and situations that try our patience and trust that we are all a work in progress!!
So with that, here are a few lessons we’ve learned about patience:
We are not in full control of anything.
Sometimes going with the flow is less stressful.
Don’t let the little things distract you from the good things. AND
Always “Enjoy The Journey On The Way To Your Destination.”
