You're married, you did it! Congratulations! This is one of the very best decisions that you have ever made. Depending on what season of marriage you are in when you read this or listen to this podcast you are either elated and ready to get it on, you are just sick and tired of your spouse and can't wait to go to work tomorrow, or you have settled into a good rhythm in your marriage for a moment. Yes my brother you will go through season in your marriage just like you will go through seasons in life. The great thing is that seasons are necessary, for an example it cannot always be summer because eventually there would be drought and everything would dry up and die. Now we do not want that to happen!
Frustration happens! Repeat after me, Frustrations happens, but patience must be carefully cultivated.
So now that we have a full understanding that frustration happens morning, noon and night it is our focus to learn how to cultivate patience for our everyday life. Understand this, who you are in private is much more important that who you are in public. Ultimately your private person will invade your public personification of who you want us to believe you are.
When we cultivate patience we are retuning our intuition and we begin to operate in compassion, and act with empathy. We have be detuned by our culture and the digital age in which we live in. Everything you want is at your finger tips. 100 years ago when you wanted to know the temperature you would either open the front door and step outside and look up in the sky or put you had to the window. Now while you are taking a show you can ask Google, Siri or Alexa what the temperature is and get a response within a millisecond. Now do not get me wrong I love technology and I love the age that we have been blessed to live in however it does not teach us to wait, it does not teach us to be patience. It has however taught us that whatever we want we should have it right now.
In your marriage this has the ability create fractures, fissures and discontinuity. So when frustration happens in your marriage, and let me tell you this, it will happen. Here are some tips to begin to cultivate your garden of patience. I specifically used the metaphor of a garden because when a seed is planted you can go to the garden and get what you need for the day, and return when you need it again and it will be there ready to be harvested.
Remember this, patience must be cultivated through practice.
1. Use the S.T.O.P. method:
S: Stop what you were doing or speak out loud to yourself, "I need to pause and reflect".
T: Take a breath and remember who you are in Jesus Christ
O: Observe what is going on in your body, in your emotions, in your thoughts. How are these things lining up with a Godly Man? How are they lining up with with the spiritual practices of love that you are striving for?
P: Proceed. After taking an opportunity to "check-in" It is time to move forward the way the Holy Spirit is speaking to you.2. Teach yourself patience with small things. Chose situations in your daily living to slow down and recognize that you should be exercising patience. In traffic, when your children do not take out the trash, when you find yourself cleaning up after people, when standing in a long line in a retail establishment. Practicing to be patience in each of these "small" things will build and build and give you insight for the larger things.
Scriptures to help you cultivate patience:
James 5:7 Psalms 37:7 Philippians 4:6 Luke 21:19 Romans 5:3 Romans 12:12 James 1:3 1 Peter 5:6 Isaiah 40:31 Colossians 1:11 Hebrews 10:36 Hebrews 6:12,15
