day 306: Patience

As I was thinking about today's post, I realized that at work the rare time that someone tells you that you have to have patience is when they are telling you that you are not going to achieve something that you want, that they are in control of giving. For example; a promotion, a transfer, a pay increase or more compensation of any sort. I can hear myself having told others, "You just need to be patient". I also have used different words to say the same thing like, "It's not a matter of if, it is a matter of when". I can't say that this is all bad, it's just that the juxtaposition of this message with most of the other messages in business that makes the message difference so stark. In one conversation, like in most, it is about how fast can we achieve something, but when it comes to our own development and progression, we are to have "patience". That all said, we know that patience is a virtue and those who have a healthy dose of it seem to be happier and have more long-term endurance. It is one of the harder areas in our lives to balance at work because it means having both a long-term view while still having short-term "oomph". In this Christmas season, I think of a group of people who must have had an enormous amount of patience. These being the shepherds who were the first to be told and see the baby Jesus. Of course, they had to be shown to believe, but once they were in the presence of Jesus they knew then and there that He was the King. But think about what happened next to them. They went back to their work, into the fields, and then depending upon their age at the time, may never have known if Jesus was really the King or not. For another 30 years, they would have no indication of what they saw that night was real, or not. What faith the ones who held their belief all that time must have had. Even their best of friends and family must have begun to worry about them after they kept telling the same story over and over with nothing to prove it really happened. We are like that many times too. We trust in God for something in the moment that we know he can deliver, but after time, if nothing happens, our trust and faith erodes and dissipates as if we never believed in the first place. God gives us the example of the shepherds in Luke Chapter 2 as examples of faith and patience. We, like them, need to have the patience to wait and hold on to what we believe and in God's own time, He will reveal Himself once again. Today would be a great day to reflect on the patience of the shepherds and to challenge ourselves on our own patience level not only with God, but with others around us. He wants us to be the ones who have the patience, of Job and the patience of the shepherds.

Reference: Luke Chapter 2 (New Living Testament)