This is just a quick post (more or less), written while I'm chilling on my back deck, enjoying some sweet, sunny weather on the rainy West Coast. It's mostly a ramble, which I may try to organize one day, but I'll probably just leave it as it is.
I was sitting in one of my church meetings when we were asked, "In order to be like God, we can emulate characteristics that the Savior had; what kinds of attributes can we develop to be more like them?", and the first thing that came to my mind was patience. It's not really a kind of patience we can have or develop right now though, I think. When babies cry, I get a kind of knot of irritation in me, maybe. There are things that people do that can really annoy me, and being naturally argumentative doesn't help in any regard. So I was thinking that while we can pray for patience, find ourselves in situations that stir up a lot of aggravation, and generally work on being "more patient" (whatever that means), there's only so far we can develop that attribute. I think our patience reaches maximum capacity as humans, and until we're dead and learning to advance ourselves, there's no higher our patience can go. That's all because God has infinite and eternal patience. I mean, we can join His church, fall away into sin, come back and repent, sin, repent, sin, sin, repent, etc., and He's still going to love us, to hope that we'll come back. He accepts what we do, because He gave us the ability to make choices, not that He likes everything we do (far from it, occasionally, I'm sure), but He lets us do them. He's more patient than any parent, or all parents combined.
Maybe that's why we've been hardwired to want children and families; our patience-capacity is reached early on as single adults, and then after having children we can increase it to it's worldly capacity, if we reach it, then have to wait until we're corpsified and resurrected to have a patience that's more like God's.
Praying for patience is the same as praying for trials. I prayed for a trial by fire, actually, while feeling cocky during an intense work-out in grade 10 - I received the trial straight away and it took me almost four years to find my way out of it. If you think you can handle it though, try praying for some patience.
