“Love will inspire you to become a patient person. When you choose to be patient, you respond in a positive way to a negative situation. You are slow to anger. You choose to have a long fuse instead of a quick temper. Rather than being restless and demanding, love helps you settle down and begin extending mercy to those around you. Patience brings an internal calm during an external storm.
No one likes to be around an impatient person. It causes you to overreact in angry, foolish and regrettable ways. The irony of anger toward a wrongful action is that it spawns new wrongs of its own. Anger almost never makes things better. In fact, it usually generates additional problems. But patience stops problems in their tracks. More than biting your lip, more than clapping a hand over your mouth, patience is a deep breath. It clears the air. It stops foolishness from whipping its scorpion tail all over the room. It is a choice to control your emotions rather than allowing your emotions to control you, and shows discretion instead of returning evil for evil.”
– Excerpt from The Love Dare
I’m starting to go through The Love Dare with my church small group, and the first section is on love being patient. Patience doesn’t always come easily to me, though I have noticed it’s starting to come to the forefront more being a parent – which is a good thing, because I think I’ll need 100x more patience than I have now in order to be a good father to Logan. It’s amazing when I think of how much more patient God is with me than I am with anyone else in His Creation…
