May 13 2019 Colossians 1:1-14

May you be prepared to endure everything with patience.

In my head I understand this. Being impatient doesn’t make traffic any less bad, or frustrating people any less irksome. The less something is in my heart, the easier it is for my head to rationalize this as true. For example, traffic doesn’t ever bother me. I can, in fact endure with patience. But the closer something is to my heart, the harder it is for my head to interject endurance. The easier it is to be impatient, or hurt, even if my head knows better. 

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and while I understand it’s largely a contrived ‘holiday’, it has always been a nice weekend of nuclear family, first with my parents and brother, and now with my husband and kids. It’s always felt like a bonus weekend, because my birthday falls within a week of Mother’s Day, so some times I get two weekends of celebration, and some years I get one really great celebration.

I ended my yesterday with a trip to the hospital to see my sick family member. It was not a pleasant time. They were distant, largely incoherent, and angry. They talked about voices, about lying to doctors so they could return to our home, about why they couldn’t just smoke legalized marijuana (not helpful, Oregon). After about 45 minutes, they asked us to leave, because it was more interesting in their head, than talking to us. As I rode my bike home, I cried frustrated, impatient, angry tears. 

I was definitely not enduring things with patience, joyfully giving thanks to the Father. 

But before our challenging 'conversation',  we’d brought dinner. Burgers, fries and fresh strawberry shakes. There was genuine gratitude and joy as we all had our fast-food dinner in the hospital. Maybe this patience thing is to hold on to the good bits. If I think about that dinner, and the highlights of the night, it wasn’t all hard. Maybe one way to endure is to focus on the whole arc of the story or event, rather than just the hard bits.

This morning I’m thinking about biking in Portland. There are trolley and train tracks throughout down town. When you are going the right direction and cross the tracks perpendicularly, they make a rhythmic ‘thump thump’ sound as your tires glide across the breach. But if you spend too much time in the tracks, hitting them too close to parallel, they throw you off your bike. There are silly looking warning signs all over town. Silly, but accurate. Twice, my extremely fit husband has taken a tumble for precisely this reason. 

Maybe enduring the hard parts are like the trolley tracks. In the grand scheme of life, they’re pretty small and easily endured. It’s when we ride along those low places that we can get thrown. Today, I want to see all the joy and good and flat ground surrounding the trolley tracks in my life. I want to endure with patience, and joyfully give thanks, rather than looking like the guy in the street sign.