Waiting to Have Patience!

Barbie will be gone for the next few days helping her mother's re-election campaign. She'll return at the end of the week.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have a hard time with patience and apparently, I passed that trait down to my kids. Over the weekend, we traveled to Orange Beach, Alabama so I could speak at a convention. The children have never been to the beach or seen the ocean and my husband thought this would be a good time to take them and make some memories (what was he thinking?). A friend let us borrow their portable DVD player, we stocked up on snacks and made sure we took the stuffed animals and blankets for the trip. What should've been a 5 hour trip took almost 8 hours! The traffic in Mobile was horrific..bumper to bumper. When we got to Loxley and made the turn to head south, we moved along an inch at a time. At hour 6, the kids were getting tired and so were we at Gracie's questions, "How much longer to the beach?"

We get impatient waiting on God many times. Whether we have asked for physical healing, emotional healing or spiritual insight, God doesn't work on our time table. 'Why won't He work faster? The solution seems so easy!', I've often thought. Ecclesiastes 7:8 says, "Better is the end of a thing than the beginning of it, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit." How true that is. After persevering through the long trip and telling Gracie to 'Have patience. We'll be there soon', we finally made it. Although we didn't have as long to play at the beach we initially planned for, the children had a blast. We made sandcastles and played in the water for a couple of hours (and of course, took lots of pictures). So yes, the end was better than the beginning and we all learned how to be a bit more patient in our spirit.