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It's very hard

somedays to be patient with certain people in my life, friends etc. I feel I expect them to act a certain way and if they don't, I don't gently correct them for their benefit.
Instead I think they should know better, they should have certain things down by now and move along. They should keep it together and not me trying to do the cheerleader for them.

I feel impatience has grown more due to my job in the Crisis Unit. Because I see acute crisis, people who are struggling to take their lives away through different means, I find it hard to connect with mundane daily issues. I almost want to say: You don't know what's happening to x person who has no food, no place to go, has past hx of trauma and abuse and is completely lonely with no social supports-so don't complain.

On the other hand, I also find that it is important for me to respect God's desire for me to be patient. I believe in the idea that there's no excuse for me to be impatient, no matter what is happening in my life. I believe strongly in patience and compassion and ironically it is in these very two qualities I am being challenged the most these days: my very two strengths are being tested.

And when I feel I am being tested on my strengths it is like a fish struggling about swimming, or a bird challenged because of its singing. It is unnatural to my personality. And to restore that back, it would be to use the psychological tools and a lot of prayer, to rely on God for filling my bucket with water so I may not run dry.

Challenges like these always remind me of what C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, has written about being deeply aware of one's own inedaquacy and badness. It may not sound so encouraging but it definitely encourages me because he expresses in a real way what people are truly all about.

It encourages me because in a more clear sense it has revealed to me my impatience, and in doing so, it has revealed to me my need for a savior. I need this humbling, I need to be reminded of Christ as my savior and the awareness that I fail at times even in my strongest assets.

C.S. Lewis- Mere Christianity

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. …A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means – the only complete realist.