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Something Light: Fruit of the Spirit
As the mother of a toddler, I’m finding that God is giving me plenty of daily opportunities to practice the Fruit of the Spirit:
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Of late, achieving consistent patience seems to be my greatest challenge. Case in point: Yesterday, I found myself fishing a box of crayons and flash cards out from under our refrigerator where Little Miss had thought it would be nice to stash them. Earlier this week, the point of contention was my “baby-proofed” office desk drawer, which she can still manage to squeeze her hands into and litter the floor with pens, pencils, rubber bands, and more.
What Fruit of the Spirit is presently your greatest challenge?
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Patience.
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Joy
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Goodness.
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We talked about this in our small group at church one time. Two of us said joy, with patience being pretty easy for us. Two said patience, with joy being much easier. I wonder if there’s something about people’s personalities that makes one of those naturally easier and one harder. (I know that these are supernatural work by the Spirit, but I would think that personality plays some part.)
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Kristin:
I can relate to your toddler challenges. Mine is 1-1/2, and he gets into everything he can get his hands on, too.
But for me, the greater challenge to my patience is my 5-year-old daughter. Her favorite response to me seems to be ‘No!’ and it just sends me through the roof. It’s all I can do to keep a cool head, and very often I don’t.
So, patience for me, too, but mine is tried differently.
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I was told that being an older parent was good because you have more patience when you’re older. Not necessarily true. Maybe the patience thing is not so much personality as where you are in life. Joy is easy when you have small children around, they’re funny, they’re adventurous, you get to play with toys and on playground equipment, but they do require a LOT of patience.
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KBells,
Maybe joy is easy for you when you have small children around, but it wasn’t that way for me (and still isn’t, though my own children aren’t small anymore). Playing on playground equipment isn’t fun for me when you change pieces of equipment about every ten seconds, and playing with toys can be a challenge when they have very definite ideas about how to play and you’re doing it the right way. My son loves pretend play, but it’s really hard to see what he’s pretending to see when he hasn’t told me what it is, and then if I pretend it’s something different he’s upset because that’s the wrong thing. I try to explain that I can’t see what he’s pretending, but the idea doesn’t seem to sink in. (At nine, he’s still that way.)
I can be very patient with him, but play with him is work for me. The joy is in reflecting later on the privilege of helping him grow up, and seeing him slowly develop new abilities. But I find it hard to be joyful while we’re playing.
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Patience and gentleness.
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I experienced the Fruit of the Spirit at the hands of MiM and Victoria just last night! It was bitter and sour. yuck.
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Pauline, I’ve been there too. It’s a roller coaster.
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Patience comes to those that wait a long, long time. Much longer than you think – nearly forever is about right. But, you will be rewarded with the good and joyous – a president of the USA or something quite different like a mass murdering Marxist depending on how gently you wait or how hard you spank
There is a very great chance you will get something totally unwanted, unnecessary and unneeded in between the two though.
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It’s hard when children are young – one minute their the darling of the household, the next they do something so strange you have no choice but to laugh –
My little one was about 3 – new carpet throughout – I went into ‘little one’s bedroom and what had been done, why STICK FIGURES in large foot size in lots of colors all over the new carpet. All I could do was laugh, it was hilarious, to see all those stick people – lucky the crayons were the washable kind.
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Peace. I’m worried about an Obamian world wide economic collapse augmented by an Iranian nuclear holocaust followed by world war and international chaos. But other than that I’m fine.
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patience — always has been and always will be. I have little tolerance for waiting — meetings, slow people both intellectually and physical, etc. I will often refuse to line up for something if the line is too long. I’d rather do something else and come back later. Once I’m finished work, I have very little patience for the rest of the world. 12 year olds I will occasionally wait for but adults have no excuse.
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#14,
that explains the left to a very great degree. Sadly so few act over 12 years old.
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HRW is a Christian?! That’s news to me.
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no illama it explains why i rarely comment on your posts
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