Tips for Caregivers; Practicing Patience

"Patience is the companion of wisdom." Augustine

The above quote by Augustine is an ancient one, but certainly is right on target and still applies to our modern lives. Patience and wisdom are closely connected. Wise mothers often sooth their children by saying, "patience will come, but you might have to wait for it." Tod any caregivers are in the position of “waiting for it”. Because we all live in such a fast paced, frantic, and out-right crazy world today and expect instant and imdicate results or gratification patience is a hard lesson to learn for most of us; especially when the trial of care giving is heaped on top.

Patience can be defined as the ability to bear pain or trials calmly while enduring waiting or delay. The patient person is not hasty or impetuous, but is persevering and steadfast, despite difficulties or adversity. As a virtue, patience is closely related to and rooted in the virtue of hope, because it implies long-suffering endurance and steadfastness. How many times have we all said, "my hope is...” well, that hope we speak about, actually takes patience.


Patience is also closely connected to the virtue of courage as it is bravely enduring, long-suffering and steadfast for the sake of a resultant positive or good ending. This would apply to not only most of our business lives, but our personal lives as well; this is especially true for caregivers. Many imagine patience to be the trait of someone who is a passive person, but it often manifests itself in an active spirit of resistance, not simply passive endurance. Look at Gandhi or Martin Luther King, for example, no one can say they had passive personalities. So, patience can also be considered a social virtue, because it has much to do with our
thoughts, words and actions toward our fellow man, particularly during trials or adversity.

In the ancient world, as another example, the Jewish community saw patience as one of the universal attributes of one who was just and loving. In fact, God even first described himself to Moses on Mt. Sinai with the Hebrew words "erek appayim," which means, "slow to anger; patient." (EX 34:6) This description of the patient nature of God is repeated a total of 10 times throughout the Old Testament. And remember the Hebrew biblical figure, Job; he was also a classic model of patience. This virtue, along with Job's faith and hope in God, ultimately brought a providential outcome for him. In the New Testament, Jesus became righteously angry at times, he was the perfect gospel model of patience in his love, long-suffering, steadfastness, and endurance to the end. Later on, in Paul's New Testament letters, patience became the fruit of the spirit of love. Paul wrote, "The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, etc." (GAL 5:22) So, we are told that, "Love is patient." (1 COR 13). The busy routine of care giving exemplifies love; even when patience seems far away.

It's interesting that in the New Testament, the Greek word for patience is
"makrothumia," which is a combination of two words: makro, which means long and thumia, which means temper. So, the word for patience is rendered as "long-tempered." Long-tempered people are hard to come across today. All of us know people we've met who are short tempered; but long-tempered people are able to absorb life's trials and annoyances without exploding in anger and losing their tempers. How many of these people do we meet each day?

The vice of impatience has its root in selfish-pride. It was the great writer, C.S. Lewis, who said, "Pride is a vice which everyone in the world loathes when they see it in someone else. The more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others." It's so hard for all of us to muster the patience just to put up with certain people, isn't it? More often than not, that impatience will ultimately work to our disadvantage.

Finally, what is perfect is unchangeable, and we are all imperfect people and all need to change some things about ourselves. There is also a close connection between patience and humility. Humble self-estimation enables us to see who we really are and what about us needs changing. One of the greatest tests of anyone's patience then, is to bear patiently with our own faults, failings, and imperfections. If, on the other hand, you are of the opinion that you are already a perfect person, well then, you might want to get a second opinion. And I might suggest that you probably should ask the youngest member of your family. You'll definitely get an honest answer.



Source: www.examiner.com