Patience is a Virtue

Or so the saying goes. I don’t have patience. I think having patience would be amazing. It is definitely something I am striving for. I just get so irritated with people and situations that require patience. For example, what inspired this post is someone who should know better emailed me and asked me if our website was updated with some particular information. Really? Is this person so incompetent that they can’t check the website themselves? Seriously? The most frustrating part about this whole scenario is that this isn’t the first time I’ve had this kind of question. I suppose I am exercising some sort of patience with these people because I literally have to close the email do something else for a bit and then respond nicely. If that isn’t patience, then I don’t know what else is.

Speaking of patience. I’ve mentioned before that Neil and I teach 3 year olds at church. I wanted to love this calling. I wanted to tell funny stories about them. I wanted to just think they are the cutest little kids ever. But that is not the case. This is absolutely the hardest calling I have ever had. Just two weeks ago Neil and I had to take our turn doing sharing time. This was our second time. Our first sharing time did not go as well as I would have liked. So I decided something big, flashy, and exciting was in order for our next sharing time. So I spent weeks planning and days preparing the best sharing time lesson ever. Well, this one didn’t go as planned either. We are asked to include the kids in our class for our presentation which is difficult when you have 3 year olds. They can’t read and their attention span is non-existent. So we decided to have them hold pictures for our game. We have 12 kids on our roll and we average about 4-7 each week. The weeks prior to our sharing time we were only having about 4 kids coming regularly. Which is much easier to manage. But of course on our sharing time day 9 kids show up. Do you realize how difficult it is to manage that many 3 year olds? Well, it was one thing just to get them to stand quietly holding their picture and a whole other thing when about 4 of the kids had melt downs right there in front of the primary because they didn’t get to play the game. In fact, one of them had to be taken out by the Primary President all while we were trying to do our lesson. Somehow, we made it through but I had a melt down of my own. I had worked so hard preparing and studying the lesson and then to just have it fail miserably was difficult. Then we had to still make it through singing time and teach our class lesson.

I have no patience for children. I can’t understand when we ask them to sit in their seats, or stop hitting their neighbor or to be quiet, they just look at you and continue with whatever they were doing. I also have little patience for some of their parents. We actually had a parent that peeked into the primary room and saw her child army crawling around the room while we were chasing him down but didn’t do anything. When she picked him up after class she said, “Sorry he doesn’t behave very well and did you take him to the bathroom?” What am I suppose to say to that? “Yeah, we are sorry too. Too bad he doesn’t have a parent that disciplines him and takes him to the bathroom themselves?” I hate to criticize parents because I am not one. Nor is this helping me to find confidence in order to be one but still I would just hope that I knowingly wouldn’t let my child reign terror in primary.

I suppose I am an awful person for publicly sharing my thoughts on this subject. I suppose I am in no way working on developing patience if I am just complaining about the situations that could make me a better person. But honestly in some ways venting about the trauma that primary has caused makes me feel better. Plus, it has given me just enough time to cool off and respond nicely to that email.