Get - O - Life

Many times when dealing with stress, I have found myself silently praying for patience. What I didn't realize is that patience is not something that comes wrapped in colored paper and tied with a ribbon. Patience is something that comes through suffering and through waiting--through surviving the bad stuff, you learn that you can survive anything and you get more comfortable with doing it. So every time I was praying for patience, I was asking God to give me new burdens to exercise my patience. 

I just learned that I'm not the only one who listened to people like Corrie Ten Boom, Nicky Cruz, and Joni Ericson Tada, and grumbled that I had such a boring testimony--being born into a nice normal Christian family and never succoming to a temptation more serious than speeding on the highway or cheating on a diet and never experiencing any suffering worse than a migraine or root canal surgery seems pretty boring.

 

I didn't consider that the only way that prayer could be answered was by giving me something to struggle through--and a spouse with a serious mental illness (like bipolar) certainly fills that bill.