You Did What!?

I’m not the oldest, nor am I the wisest. However, I am smart enough to know one should never, under any circumstances, pray for patience.

There's only one way by which one develops this particular attribute. Just as one doesn’t become skinny by eating a lot; one doesn’t become endowed with patience by things coming unto them easily and quickly. Just the opposite.

My mother used to be the churchgoing type, and she did so, religiously. I’m not the churchgoing type. While sitting there, I cultivate so many questions, that if I were to voice them - I’m pretty sure they’d ask me to leave. My mother, on the other hand, either doesn’t have many questions or she keeps them to herself; except for one day. My parents were going through a rough patch. And although my mother tried to handle it with grace, she found it difficult - as anyone would. After church, she and the pastor were talking. Somewhere in the conversation she relayed the fact that she had prayed for more patience. To which the pastor, obviously succumbing to a knee jerk reaction, boomed, “Oh no! Now you’ll be waiting even longer!”

Needless to say, my mother had to be scraped off the floor and carried to her car. 

Pastor’s are real people. I have to imagine they say all the wrong things just as much as the next guy. God knows I’ve blatted out things that never should’ve been said. But this statement nearly killed my mother spiritually. She left church that day - doomed.

I never pray for patience. Never have and never will. I do, at times, ask that I be given the right words. I ask for help - a lot. I ask for guidance - even more.

But I don’t look at God or the Creator in the same way as my mother or others do. Perhaps my detachment from the bearded fellow from above started with such things as seeing the look of defeat upon my mothers face, once she heard she had, in essence, prayed for more of what she wanted to avoid. Although I understood the only way one develops strength is by putting it to the test - it seemed cruel. She wasn’t wanting patience, she wanted relief; help from their dire situation. I didn’t care much for a God that would punish someone due to an innocent word fumble. That’d be like writing an excellent report in high school, just to get an “E” because it wasn’t double spaced or the eager student forgot to center the title. I don’t care for any system that pays more attention to the insignificant details than it does the meaning and content of the subject at hand.

I think it was about this time in my youth that I began to question the bible; the book my mother tried hard to shape her world around. When I was little I believed God wrote the bible, therefore I thought it was a divinely written tome. Once I learned it had been written and rewritten by numerous men, with varying motives, I viewed it with suspect. Everyone I knew, couldn’t retell a story accurately if their life depended upon it. Why would the bible be any different.

I can‘t say whether my mother’s patience ever developed to the point that she's no longer bothered by waiting. I can say, she no longer goes to church every Sunday. Instead, she lives nestled into the side of a mountain; ironically, she’s closer to God now than ever before. But then again, I’m the kind that believes God, or this universal life force, lives everywhere; not just inside, nor outside - but everywhere. 

Sane