July 27

PATIENCE MONTH: DAY 27: “Bread – like real love – took time, cultivation, strong loving hands and patience. It lived, rising and growing to fruition only under the most perfect circumstances.” ― Melissa Hill

There are some great analogies of what takes patience and develops slowly. My favorites are Nature references and gardening, because I live with that every day. In the early days of learning to garden, I was very impatient with the time it takes for things to grow. The early stuff was flowers and beans. I was 11 or 12 when I did that.

I also grew up in a rural place and we had lots of animals, so I got to wait for the birth of baby dogs, cats, fish, birds, chickens, horses, etc. These taught me the cycle of birth and death. There was always a high mortality rate for the cats, because we lived on a busy street and that was just part of life. I feel sorry for kids who grow up in cities without animals and that whole thing. (Although I could have done without my brother and his rats and mice and snakes! Ugh!)

Those things that are most precious are those that are delayed gratification. I remember saving money for special things when I was young and how excited I would be to count it and watch it come to the point where I could go and buy that thing, whatever it was. Quite often, it was something to do with an animal.

Anyway, I am less inclined to be patient with saving money for a special thing today. Today we buy special things and put them on a credit card or make payments. But the real treasures in life take time…love is a great example here. As is bread rising, as is a turkey baking, or a garden growing the perfect tomato or the perfect eggplant and squash. Some of my squash take weeks to develop and mature. Others (zucchini) seem to appear in an instant! But the garden is a practice in patience.

This is how I visualize myself and the growth and development of my spirit. I have some quick lessons and a lot of very slow growth. I spoke with a friend last evening and we were talking about the slow growth we have experienced in working through some relationship stuff with recognizing old ideas and causes and conditions. It has taken some of us many, many years of work to get to the point where we are healing our behaviors and attitudes and changing the way we view the whole thing. This stuff isn’t all that quick.

The best part of working with others is that we get to see how slow some of this process can be. I am grateful for the women who have sponsored me and with whom I work, because the teaching is imperative to my own process. I get to see who I have been and how I have grown in doing the work with them. I have not been able to stop after one round of steps with anyone, because the stuff we get to do in later years is some of the best work we ever do! We may learn how problematic some of our behaviors and attitudes are in the early work, but the real healing takes a long time, at least in the cases of myself and those with whom I am blessed to do this stuff.

So it keeps me on an even keel when I can see that my growth and process have taken a long, long time and I never, ever give up on the process! I, and my friends who trudge along with me, are not done; but we sure are better than we used to be!