Practicing Patience - revisited

Spiritual resource to share: old inspirational favorites

It has been almost two years that I've been blogging and I am happily surprised at how much the conversation on spirituality, prayer and healing is on the web. I have been engaged and linked to many other sites. This one article (below) has been included in about a dozen other ezines and is probably one of my most viewed/read articles. It was written when our family just moved from the Boston area to the northwoods of Wisconsin.

Stillness.. Quiet..... Peace.....Lots of it. Lots and lots of it.

It has been a couple of quiet weeks. I started getting anxious. "Father, is there something more I should be doing?" I asked God.

Busy is good. According to my recent hospital volunteer training in culturally competent care, I learned that Americans consider busy-ness to signify importance. (As in "Love to talk with you now, but gotta run. I am very important.") It follows that busy-ness is second to the I-gotta-fix-it drive. Although I thought the I-gotta-fix-it approach was a guy thing, I started seeing how these two elements were part of my operating system and they were jamming it up.

I am not busy - I could make myself so, but that is not the point. I have little to fix. I have fixed most everything and little is coming my way to fix. Hmmmm. I thought. Not busy. Little to fix. SO then who am I?

I started thinking about patience. It didn't start off well.I reasoned that if I can tolerate patience for a while, then later, I get to be busy and do stuff. I moved on to thinking that if I get the right thinking thing down, double that with the patience, then I get to go somewhere.

OK, I needed another angle. I think the point may be to get beyond a busy life to a meaningful life.

When I did whitewater kayaking, we had a name for those who stayed in the calm waters of the eddy, waiting to figure out how to do a rapid -- sometimes waiting for long periods of time. We called them "eddy flowers."

Being an eddy flower was an anxious thing to be. You could get swamped by indecision, doubt and grow increasingly intimidated by the rapid ahead of you. Far better it was to determine your course and just do it. In fact, that is how I have handled most of my life. See. Pray. Do. Quickly, efficiently, full throttle.

The "aha" thought came today that now, in this quiet time, there is actually lots of life going on. Perhaps I am not in the eddy at all, but am flowing along with the current of life. Perhaps it is a new river, and instead of being a roaring class IV-V, it is a calm class I-II, teeming with life and gorgeous every splash of the way.

As I am typing now, my family is going about their usual routine, and I am looking out over a stand of birch, maple and pine trees with the wind flickering all the leaves. This is the epitome of pleasantness.

In the quiet of the last few mornings, I had a distinct thought about someone I love very much. Although I would never suspect that this person would ask for healing through prayer - through Christian Science treatment, I thought through how I would pray for this person if called on. I opened my favorite book on prayer and healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, randomly fell on some ideas and started praying.

The next day, I was told this person was in the emergency room. I went to visit him and he commented that he was going to call me to ask for treatment the night before. We talked and what we shared made me realize that in the quiet of those few days, I had been mentally preparing to be of help to him. And he was helped.

I realized that there was never a moment lost. What we gain in moments of stillness is our strength in moments of need.


Here are some wonderful bits about presentness, moments and stillness.

"The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. The will of God is manifest in each moment, an immense ocean which only the heart fathoms insofar as it overflows with faith, trust and love." — Jean-Pierre De Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment

"Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life." — Philip Simmons in Learning to Fall

"The best spiritual type of Christly method for uplifting human thought and imparting divine Truth, is stationary power, stillness, and strength; and when this spiritual ideal is made our own, it becomes the model for human action.."--Mary Baker Eddy in Retrospection and Introspection

Photo by Gabe Korinek


To share your thoughts on this or to explore this idea further, please feel free to be in contact with me, add your own comments below, email this article to a friend, or add to the healing finds and sites on the web to the right.