Photo from Pixabay

During these mid summer days, we can get some beautiful skylines. It is important that when such moments like these come our way, that we can pause and enjoy the moment for what it is.

Thought on Wednesday – July – 13/07/2022

‘Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself.’ St.Francis de Sales

There is a lovely Jewish story from ancient times about an old man who was in his hundredth year and who wandered into Abraham’s camp just before nightfall. Abraham being a good Jew welcomed the man and offered him hospitality. While the food was cooking Abraham suggested that they pray together. Abraham raised his hands and his eyes towards heaven and began the evening prayer. After a while he saw the old man worshipping the campfire. Stopping for a moment he corrected the old man and asked him to direct his prayers to the Almighty.

But the old man went back to worshiping the fire. This went on a few times and Abraham lost his patience and threw the old man out of the camp. He went back to prayer “See Lord, how much I love you.” There was silence and then he heard the Lord say, “Abraham, I have put up with that old man and his unusual ways for the past 100 years and you cannot put up with him even for five minutes!”

Sometimes we need patience and lots of patience. We need to be patient with life, with family, with nature, with love, with our hopes and dreams and with all we are doing right now. But we can never be patient with anybody else unless we are first patient with ourselves. We often want everything to happen today. There is no tomorrow or next week. We also expect others to be almost perfect, to have everything right and to have it ready the way we want. That is so unfair and unrealistic. They can only do their best and work at their pace. So to be patient with ourselves means being more gentle with ourselves, lowering our expectations, going more with the flow and being more flexible.

It is being ourselves more and not pretending to be somebody else. There is a lovely old saying: “Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting”.