Patience and the Big, Wide World

So I am slightly impatient. Slightly? Okay, I'm sticking with slightly. It sounds better when I read it aloud. But I'm also honest. I read if you advertise, that you can increase your number of readers. After some mulling over, I purchased a worldwide advertisement on Facebook to expedite the population of my reach for the blog. I wanted to help the world! Why didn't the world want to be helped? The Gospel is so important! Who wouldn't want to hear it?

Apparently, the world does not possess my zeal for Christ's truth and the joy that it possesses. Apparently, my quirks and nerdy ways aren't the only thing that makes me different. Who knew?

Sigh. Come on, people! Christ is amazing! Let's keep talking about Him!

I should've known it. But in my quest to help others to learn what I have, I overlooked the fact that this worldview is a counterculture view.

I felt a tug on my heart. Calm down. Sit with Him. Remember the most important thing isn't the masses of people that like and never read. I remembered what Mother Teresa said, "[if] you can't feed a hundred, then just feed one." If one person appreciated one thing, that should be enough. If the Holy Spirit spoke to one person in anything I've said, I have fed one. Is that not the point?

But teaching someone who has been ingrained into mainstream society for so long to be patient? It feels so excruciating! We are taught to give up in mainstream society. When we don't reach enough people, we are taught to stop blogging. When we no longer like our spouses, we are taught to stop being married. When we don't like our jobs, we flit from employer to employer. Phones and car models are changed yearly. Food is purchased at restaurants or cooked in the microwave. Easier is always better and better is the key to a happy life, right? Eh...

In 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 we read:

Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury.

What if this applies to more than just romantic love, as it is used as a Wedding reading? What if since joy is love, true happiness, joy, is patient. Joy is kind. And when you are joyful you are not jealous or overinflated or rude. When you are joyful you seek to help others and not your own interests? There is nothing easy about that. However, it does produce a more fruitful and happier life.

What if joy requires you to sit still and not care how many people you talk to but the quality of the conversation? How many of us get swept up in how society treats people and forget what the Church teaches us? When we read scripture we are confronted head on with lessons of compassion, empathy, kindness, and love. Then we close our Bibles, we exit our houses or log on to our social media. That's when mainstream society creeps in and influences us, even when we try so hard to not let it.

The more I think about it. I feel like a light bulb just went off in the dark room that is my head. It all stems back to patience. I've learned so much about it over the last few years. This was just another way of letting me know that I need to take a step back. And if I need to remember that, maybe, someone else out there in the big, wide world needs to be reminded that joy is patient. And, maybe, just maybe, then I fed one.

So, moral to this little story is that I'm not quitting. I still want to help the world, just in a different way. I'm returning to the foot of cross and resuming my quest for patience and, thus, joy. Will you join me? Do you ever get caught up in everyday that you forget that life is not about what we get instantly but the relationship with Christ we work at every, single day? How do you resist the temptation to be like everyone else and achieve something, anything, without putting in the work that it requires?

With joy,

Kate