Patience and Grace

-A new way to experience life

Possibly one of the toughest virtues (for me personally at least), patience is one of the things that the Bible gives us a clear outline of with the Life of Jesus. The main component that Jesus’ interactions with the people he met exemplifies is grace, and in abundance. None of us like to feel as though we are being taken advantage of. Nobody wants to always be the person rolling over to the whims of others. But another thing Jesus showed us in his life is that there was only one hill worth dying on in the name of saving others. He spoke to and ate with the lepers and prostitutes, tax collectors and roman soldiers. He wasn’t going to allow the things of secondary importance impede his ability to spread the gospel. He knew he would be betrayed by Judas. He could have casted him out of the Last Supper and condemned him, or even had him killed as most humans would have done throughout most of history. Instead he had patience and loved him, and had grace and forgave him. In all of those scenarios he was using patience to love them, and grace to not judge them too harshly. Jesus was as much human as he was God, and he felt the same struggles that we feel in our day to day interactions with other people. My devotional group I’m a part of had a verse recently that we all found incredibly nourishing. “Kind words are like a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing for the body.” Proverbs 16:24 My mom used to always say to me when I was little “Micah David, words have power”. I thought it was funny to think about then, but I don’t think I ever really grasped what she was trying to say to me. Now that I’ve lived a little and felt some of what the real world has to offer, I understand her. How you speak to others and how you speak to yourself affects the way you live as a person. It changes the way you go about your day, how you respond to failure or success. I am an incredibly pessimistic person, and I am brutal to myself in my own head. This last year I’ve been working on being more positive in my interactions with my peers and it has absolutely made my life exponentially more impactful and enjoyable. I just said to a friend recently that it feels like life has a sort of glow to it, (I definitely haven’t had that before). But I’ve still got a lot of work to do on that front, most especially in the way I judge and speak to myself. But the first step is admitting you have a problem, right? I want to start healing, and if y’all want to do the same let me know, I’m thinking about starting some stuff.