After praying for years for God to infuse me with the gift or fruit of patience, long suffering, self-control and gentleness, I finally received the revelation that it is down to me to make those changes and to make the right decision in those challenging times when I’m feeling impatient.

For years, in fact, since having children, because I self-righteously thought I was a pretty good Christian until that point, I have been spiritually praying for God to walk within my internal garden, metaphorically speaking, and cultivate the fruits of the spirit, particularly patience, self-control and gentleness. I read the Holy scriptures, I pleaded in prayer, I read copious self help books, I cried before God, begging Him to change me and beseeching Him to change those aspects of me that were such crippling shortcomings. I finally received the answer, (which I think He must have been sending me for years but, for whatever reason, I hadn’t listened) that to develop a patient character I needed to CHOOSE to be patient in an impatient situation and persistently choose to be patient time after time and day after day until I BECOME a patient person in challenging times. To be a gentle person, I needed to CHOOSE to be gentle when a situation arose that could invoke a harsh reaction and then, in time, I would have that gentle attribute to my character that I’ve always longed for.

It was such a slap in the face at the time when I had this revelation and I was quite indignant at having to have to do it myself. I genuinely thought that I would have some supernatural impartation of patience, self-control and gentleness and, even though I had been taught over the years by many great teachers that we have to choose to react the right way in situations, despite not always wanting to, I could not seem to make that change.

Home is considered to be the place where we are our true selves. It is easier to make the right decision in public when we want to leave a good impression of ourselves and it’s just an isolated incident, but not so easy to apply this at home. Our home lives can be our training grounds and some of our most intense character building can take place there if we let it. As I said, IF we let it! We also have to learn to accept that there are many aspects of who we are and we need to love ALL of those aspects of ourselves, even the not-so-nice bits. We all have our secret sides that no-one but God sees. We sometimes think the self we give to the world is not really us and that’s simply not true. It’s important to embrace and accept every aspect of who we are. The sad you, the happy you, the fun-loving you, the quiet and contemplative you, the confused & depressed you and the out-going bubbly you. Whoever you are in public and whoever you are in private are all YOU! Sometimes we struggle with this concept. We think we are being false and hypocritical for not portraying the same self. I challenge this and say that you are who you are. All of you! The good, the bad, the happy, the sad, the motivated and the despondent. Sometimes we struggle with the disparity, we feel we are not being true to ourselves, we are not being honest. We think we lack integrity because we can’t make our private lives match our public lives. I say that we need to embrace and accept every aspect of who we are, remembering that even those negative expressions of ourselves are usually our unconscious minds allowing us to act in that way to serve some higher good intention for us as an individual. We need to be kind to ourselves and allow ourselves to travel our life journey with grace. Grace is undeserved favour. We all need to extend to ourselves favour (help, goodwill, act of kindness, good deed) even if we think we simply don’t deserve it. I have to believe that I am on my way to developing the sort of character I’ve always dreamed of and the outcome is really up to me.

So try and be patient with yourself this week and forgive yourself for any mistakes you feel you’ve made and keep on moving forward, even if it seems like you’re only making slow progress.

Love & blessings, Sam x