Patience

Last week I gave a talk in church on Hope. As I was studying hope I read a scripture story that showed me hope's close kin; patience. The story is an account told in Ether of the Book of Mormon. It is about a group of people who flee into the wilderness after the fall of the Tower of Babel. The Lord leads them away and tells them He is leading them to a promise land. After years of travel they arrive at a little body of water and the Lord instructs them to build barges and sail accross, which they do. They travel some more until they hit the ocean and once again they are asked to build some barges and sail accross. For the sake of keeping this blog short I'll speed past the building of the barges and into the actaul voyage. Here are the details of that trip:

"when the night came, they did not cease to praise the Lord"

-The only light they had was two stones

-Inside the barges was all their food, family, and livestock
-They had no sail, oars, or compass for them to guide themselves with
-They had to open a hole in the top in order to get air inside their ship and risk water flooding in
-The journey was around a year long

-The winds did "never cease to blow"

-From what we can tell they wasn't any way for the barges to communicate with each other



To me, there isn't much about that trip that sounds exciting, enjoyable, or relaxing. If I were on one of those barges I would be throwing a miserable fit. I would be annoyed, I would be grumpy, and I would be scared for the future. On a good day I might console myself with thoughts of "well, at least it will be worth it once we get to the promised land". The amazing thing is that that is not what any of those people did. In Ether 6:9-10 it says "And they did sing praises unto the Lord; yea...and when the night came, they did not cease to praise the Lord.". Personally, it would take the voyage being a paid production of a reality T.V. show that was also strictly a musical for me to even sing a note during the trip. Why? Because I lack patience. And that got me thinking, what is patience?


Patience is more than passive waiting,
it is actively finding ways to be happy now

 My whole life I thought of patience as waiting. We are patient in lines, at doctor's appointments, or while waiting for water to boil while fixing dinner. That is what came to mind when I thought of the word patience. But then I realized something; wasn't that just waiting? And I finally understood that  patience does not equate waiting. Anyone can wait. That takes no talent at all. Waiters come a dime a dozen. So what sets waiting apart from patience? I think its being like those people on the barges; its learning to work hard to be happy now and not wait to be happy when the future seems brighter. When we truly have hope in our hearts that not only allows us to wait through trials because we know the future will be better, it allows us to be patient in trials. And how does hope do that for us? I think it is because when we have hope for a better future we realize that there is a reason for the hard stuff in between. We realize that life isn't about "earning" good things by "suffering" bad things. We see that the bad things in life are what makes life so good because that is how we grow and that is how we become (2 Nephi 2: 11). When we see life that way we realize we are capable of so much more than just waiting for the bad to be over; we have it in us to enjoy and grow in the bad as we wait for the good. We have hope in ourselves that we have the ability to master any hard circumstance and say "come what may and love it". It is this concept that has made this my favorite scripture by Jacob, "Therefore, cheer up your hearts, and remember that ye are free to act for yourselves" (2 Nephi 10:23). We always have the choice to be happy now-and exercising that right it true patience.

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be,
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have winced but not cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloodied but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears,
Looms but the horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years,
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
William Earnest Henley