Practicing Patience

I have been working on being more patient lately. Do you know what happens when you ask God for patience? He gives you opportunities to practice patience. Today, He gave me a lot of opportunities.

Instead of complaining about how things went wrong, I am choosing instead to be grateful for the opportunities. The following are things I am thankful for.

I am thankful for whatever wild animal circled our house all night, activating the motion lights so that they were on constantly. This resulted in Patience Lesson Number One, since the kids ALL woke up at various hours in the middle of the night, and seeing the lights outside, assumed it was morning and were very upset when they were told they had to go back to sleep.

Patience Lesson Number Two was brought by the storm cloud that dumped rain on our garage sale after I had spent about thirty minutes setting up our tables outside. This gave me an opportunity to rapidly clean up the shop so we could hold our garage sale indoors. And we only opened an hour late.

I am thankful for the stupid punk idiot teenager that I saw wandering around the driveway. I positioned myself so that I could see the gate leading into the yard, since he looked a little suspicious. He never tried to enter the yard, but he did have the audacity to carve his name backwards into my shop. I am not thankful for the lesson in patience, however, I am thankful that he was sly enough to not get caught. Because if I had seen him do this, I would probably have been busted for assaulting a teenager.
Stupid punk, I ought find you and tell your parents and make you re-paint my shop you moron. I mean, I have a happy heart. And I hope I have more paint that color, or it's going to cost the entire $67 I made to fix his stupid graffiti defacing my property teenage expression of individuality.