Carol's Corner

I look at all the puzzle pieces from a large picture puzzle scattered across the table and wonder how someone will find where they all belong. I have no patience for trying each piece until I find the one that fits. When I watched my father put a puzzle together, I noticed he looked, stared really, at the pieces. He was patient as he tried to discover the correct piece he needed at that moment. It takes patience to put a large puzzle together. There are no shortcuts in puzzles or in life.

Bill Butler in a June 2014 blog post said, “If it doesn’t fit, don’t force it. There is a mystery to a puzzle. It starts as an incoherent jumbled mess.”

Life can be an incoherent jumbled mess just like all the pieces dumped out of a puzzle box. We often, or at least I do, get impatient. I want life to be ordered, perfect and harmonious and when it isn’t I want it fixed yesterday. Yet most things happen beyond my control. I can not fix everything for myself, let alone for others. Only God knows the entire picture.

A number of years ago I lay in a hospital bed fighting for breath. I had a serious lung infection and asthma. The doctor listened to my lungs and shook his head. My skin had a grey tinge that got deeper each day due to a lack of oxygen. My lips looked like I had applied blue lipstick. The doctor said he heard no breath sounds at the bottom of my lungs. Any exertion, including the necessary coughing to rid my lungs of unwanted phlegm added to the distress my body encountered. A lady from church came to visit. She asked what to pray for and my first response was, “Patience.”

I wanted this infection to leave and leave now. I wanted the asthma to be under control immediately. I wanted to breathe freely, be discharged from the hospital and resume my everyday, normal duties of life. I was impatient for relief, impatient for healing, impatient for answered prayer. After several days of continually having my lungs become worse she told me she could not bring herself to pray for patience any longer. She felt she needed to simply leave that in God’s hand and pray for my recovery.

I ended up in the hospital for two weeks and an outpatient coming for daily nebulizer treatments multiple times a day. All summer my asthma caused breathing difficulties. I do not know or understand why God did not heal me immediately. I know he had a plan. I had to learn to be patient and listen to what my breathing allowed me to do.

Patience, the ability to put our desires on hold for a time, is not an easy task. I wish I could say I had learned how to be patient at all times but the truth is some times my impatience explodes. At other times my patience seems to be a great virtue I possess but I realize I truly do need to take this part of me to God and ask him to help me continue to learn to be patient with life circumstances, with other people, and with myself.

How is your patience? Do certain things cause it to disappear or be in short supply? May we learn from putting together puzzle pieces that if something in life doesn’t fit we shouldn’t be impatient and try and force it to be the way we think it should be. Instead I know I need to remember to trust that God’s plan is far better than anything I can imagine.