Patience. Carrot or Rod?

Greetings from the deep end!
It would seem that I have regained some of my lost brain power as I feel that it is time to take hold of a more difficult topic than my previous posts have contained. I realize that I have spoken of patience in past blogs but that is okay  because today's post deals solely with the recurrence of the "patience" lesson. Today I realized that the more patience one learns, the more patience one needs. That is to say, one always needs a little more patience than they have at present.

This leads me to one very great very, non-patient question; WHY!?! Why is it that as we go through life, growing up that is, we always need more patience. When is enough enough? Never fear my friends, Derick is on the case. My quest for answers to the "why" question has led me to two possible answers regarding the role of the "patience" lesson in life.

First, patience may be as a carrot dangled in front of a horse. I believe that patience may be simply a lesson that a person strives to gain and is thus led through life with the hope of attaining an impossible goal. "Oh, I don't have enough patience with Xander because he just punched me in the face and I yelled, guess I learned a good lesson and won't have that problem again." The next day, "Oh, Xander just punched me in the face four times and I yelled at him guess I learned my lesson and I won't do that again." Three months later, "Oh, Xander just punched me in the face stomped on my nose and broke my toe and I yelled...." See what I mean? It will never end! Sometimes I really feel like that. I feel that patience can never really be achieved but only added to and that it is in deed a goal that will always be heightened just a little higher than I can reach.

The second possibility is that "patience" is a rod shepherding me towards adulthood. In this case, it would seem that before God will allow me to accomplish the things I wish to accomplish and that I believe He wants me to accomplish I must reach a "patience bar" that He has set before me. It often seems that just as I reach a new level of patience in life God rewards me with new levels of responsibility. Not always a good thing, right? Well, not from the sloth perspective. However, from the perspective of a man-in-training, new levels of responsibility are par for the course.

As often happens, as I have been writing this I have come to a third option and one that better fits the scheme. Patience is both a carrot and a rod. It is a carrot when we are too scared to go ahead on our own and a rod when we are more zealous for the future than we should be. That is one of the most awesome things about patience, it can get you what you need and take you where you want to go, depending on the situation.

“Patience is the companion of wisdom.”
Saint Augustine