One of the biggest things the Lord has been teaching me this semester is PATIENCE. He has drawn my attention to almost every area of my life where I did not have the slightest bit of patience…. Let’s take my hair, for example. I have not had natural hair since I was 12 (or maybe 13). I still remember the day my mom first gave me comb-in highlights and to this day, I regret that decision on average, about 3 times a week. Recently however, (as of August 2009) I have been growing out my hair color to end this war against my hair color fading to red. Since August, I have cut a total of 10 inches off of my hair because I cannot stand waiting any longer. Now my hair is above my shoulders and half of my head is red. Yea, it’s beautiful…. Anyways, sometime during the past 8 months, one of my friends said to me: “Elizabeth, I don’t understand how you have so much patience with kids and driving long distances and your family….. but you can’t have the slightest bit of patience with your hair. To me, that’s the oddest thing about you and one thing I think I will never understand.”
But here’s the deal, what she doesn’t know is that I still struggle with patience in other areas of my life… like waiting for the Lord to answer a question, especially when the deadline in peaking around the corner. Or when, like this past week, my sister told me some very upsetting news about her latest lifestyle choice---and once again, I had to learn to be patient with her just like the Lord is continually patient with me and all my many mistakes.
I’ve also had to learn to address God’s work with patience in the love area of my life. Sometimes I get so tired of waiting on my “Adam to wake up.” Have you ever heard that saying? That “God didn’t wake Adam until He was finished creating Eve”…? I don’t really think the Lord is ever finished chiseling away at our flesh, but I know one of these days He will finish chiseling away at my single-girl flesh, which is preparing me for marriage, haha and start working on me for motherhood.
Not only am I impatient with the Lord’s work in my love-life, but I also learned that I’m also impatient with His work in general. This one definitely caught me off guard because I never thought that I was impatient while waiting on the Lord’s work to be completed in other people…
