“If we hope for what we don’t see, we wait for it with patience,” says Romans 8:25.

All this stimulation and outward attention has one effect: to make everything a blur and to create a sense of mental restlessness that is the antithesis of patience. David Shenk writes about this in The End of Patience: “As we go to higher info altitudes, where the information moves faster . . . our eyes, ears, and cerebral cortexes have more to

that much of life requires waiting and we have a choice to do it happily or miserably.

Impatience is a habit; so is patience. To change a habit, we need strong motivation, which comes from knowing the rewards that come from the new behavior.

It’s a combination of motivation (wanting to), awareness (paying attention to our inner landscape), and cultivation (practicing).

Patience also gives us calmness of spirit. With patience, our inner experience is more like a still pond than a raging river. Rather than being thrown into anger, panic, or fear by every circumstance life throws at us—a canceled plane, a missed deadline by a workmate, our spouse forgetting to do an errand—we are able to put it into some kind of

“When you are angry, you’re carrying the burden while the other person is out dancing.” The more we cultivate patience, the less anger we carry and the more dancing we’ll feel like doing.

None of us wants to have to suffer through physical, emotional, or spiritual hardships. But when such trials do come—and they most likely will, for each life has its measure of sorrow—we have two choices: to rail endlessly against what is happening or to experience our feelings of sorrow, fear, and anger, then engage our patience and allow the

The beauty of the decision for patience is that it doesn’t matter how impatient we consider ourselves to be. We will always have another opportunity to choose! In whatever circumstance we find ourselves right now, we are free to choose peaceableness. Each and every day, moment by moment, the decision is yours.