Sunday Meditation: Still Working on Patience

Surprise! I'm still working on patience and, as I wrote in a previous post, it's essential to be patient with ourselves as well as others. Practicing patience with myself can increase my patience with others. I'll give a concrete example. Once when I was praying for patience, I caught a spoon in the garbage disposal and had to call a repairman to come and get it out. That spoon was jammed so tight I couldn't budge it and neither could my husband. I was embarrassed, but the kind repairman showed me how to use a broom handle as a lever to turn the disposal. Fortunately, I've never needed to use that strategy again and we are now on a septic system with no garbage disposal, so I'm safe from that mistake. But I still make plenty of others, new opportunities to be patient with myself.

That mangled spoon became a reminder for me to be patient with the kids when they make mistakes. I belonged to the mistake club big time since I also backed into the fence post and broke it, which gave my poor husband an opportunity to practice patience. 

That's when I stopped praying for patience. Nevertheless, those two episodes helped me stay calm when one of the kids broke a favorite depression glass vase that belonged to my mom. Even now, I never get upset when one of the grandchildren breaks something or makes a mess because of a mistake. I just get out the vacuum or hand them paper towels and thank them for coming and telling me. I always praise them for their honesty especially after several episodes with visiting children who broke things and hid them for me to find later. 

I put the spoon in the louvered shutter in the kitchen window and left it there for several years doing its duty to remind me to be patient. No matter how bad a mistake, or even a sin, it's a lesson that can result in a good effect. The lives of many saints offer eloquent testimony to that reality.

So if you goof up today by dropping a plate or, horrors, the platter with dinner, calmly clean up and order pizza.  Life is too short to lose your peace of mind or soul without quickly coming to a solution, either thanking God for detachment for one more piece of stuff gone or the opportunity to humiliate yourself in the confessional. Only little, humble people go to heaven, as Fr. John Hardon, S.J. often said. Mistakes and repented sins offer a quick way to the road of humility that leads to heaven. We should never lament traveling that holy road. After all, we are all broken by original and actual sin, but God is the great repairman who can recreate us better than before. That's why He's God and we're not!

Have a happy Sunday!