I dream of waking up patient. Oh, I can playact patience, but so often there is something leathery and resistant in me. Something which, the further I move into adulthood, does not always want to give quarter to others. It rises up like rumbling like gravel in my chest when the leaf blower starts up outside my living room window, when the cashier at Trader Joe’s seems to want to chat with me more than he wants to scan my items, when the kid next door shrieks in play in his front yard, even, ironically, when someone beside me in line expresses their own impatience or annoyance.

I suspect patience is like courage: “every virtue at its testing point.” I imagine that if I woke up patient some floodgate would gradually open somewhere on my right shoulder, and, given time, there would flow in more hope, more kindness, more boldness, more wisdom, more of the type of love that shows itself through close, gentle attention. If only I could wait and persist. I would listen to the long monologues of others well enough to hear their poetry. I would react to my own failures by getting up, putting on a new song, and trying again. When writing I would pause on purpose as I go, believing that the still space that precedes each sentence is the germination time it requires to develop its own strength.

And if I woke up patient, I suspect I would know how to wait on the Lord. To trust his pacing—his pacing of the seasons, of the tumbling words of the people around me, of the beat of my own heart, of his footsteps as they advance his good kingdom. Oh, all of these things would be added unto me…