It’s 0806 in the morning and here I am. I can’t miss this opportunity to write down what I have gone through already today. My day has been consumed by the word “Patience”.

The word patience has literally been everywhere I have gone today. I woke up and got ready for the day. I grabbed the bible that I have been looking at lately and read “A Patient man has great understanding”. I was making coffee, looked at my phone and there was a reel on youtube about being patient. I got in the car and was listening to K-love radio and the radio host was talking about the “fruits of the soul”; Love, Joy, Peace, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, Self-control, and “PATIENCE”. I walked into work and I heard someone yelling down the hall at someone else, “Shipmate…just be patient!” And after the day I had yesterday…..Ok….God I hear you!

I have ZERO patience! I want things done now. I want things fixed now. I don’t like waiting in line, waiting for anyone, and I don’t like sitting and doing absolutely nothing most of the time. It gives me anxiety! I feel uncomfortable in my own skin. If there is a break when someone is talking I want to fill that break with my own words. So I guess it is super fitting that God wants me to learn something about patience today and I’m sorry for anyone that has had to deal with me when it comes to my patience.

You would think that being in the military would have taught me everything about being patient. It started out that way! We would stand at attention not able to move for hours, hurry up and wait to do something that only took 3 minutes, and leave home for months at a time. But in the later years of my career..I have lost any amount of patience that I had.

During my last deployment in the U.S. Navy, I was on an aircraft carrier that was deployed to the South China sea. We were out there for 8 months. During this deployment, I found myself stuck on the ship for 4 months straight without any time off the ship and doing the exact same thing every day. While the rest of the world kept moving and changing. I really do think that this time of my life started my downward spiral to where I was until today.

This had become a usual deployment during the COVID pandemic and for a few years after. Deployed ships usually stop in foreign countries every so often to let the crew off and decompress. Well during this deployment, I was stuck and could not go anywhere. I shared an office that was 5’X8′ with eight other people. They were going as crazy as I was. I was on a ship with thousands of shipmates but I always felt alone. I felt like the walls were literally moving in about half an inch closer everyday. I could not breath, think, and felt like there was no end in sight.

I would get so overwhelmed that I would think to myself that I just wanted to scream, rip apart anything that walked near me, and I wanted to jump off the ship and swim to anything that was different from where I was. I would joke that I felt like a caged lion. I wanted to roar, roam the pride lands, and I wanted to be free!

I promised to myself that once I was able to get off that ship that I would never be caged again. I wanted to do anything and everything that life had to offer. But I didn’t, I have had a great time since this terrible experience but I bottled up my anxiety for years. I still to this day get the caged lion anxiety feeling thinking about it.

So how do I get past that! Maybe it’s Patience!! I have to change the way I look at things, the way I talk with people, and the way I view what the down time in my life is consumed by.

Until today, I never thought about what a Lion also represents. Lions are the most profoundly patient animal on earth. They are strong, beautiful, and caring. They can lay around without a care in the world, they can go days without eating, and they protect what they have. Just watch any documentary on Lions…I can’t make this up.

I guess that’s what God wants me to learn today. You are a lion but if you want to say that you are one of them, then be like one in other areas of your life. Be a patient Lion instead of a caged one!

#15….I will strive everyday to be the Lion I want to be. I am not a caged lion. I am free to scream at the top of the mountain, run with the pride, lay around and do absolutely nothing, protect the things in my life, and be “Patient” for the future.

God Bless,

Recently Lost and Found

Update: I recently learned a perfect example of patients from a reading that I had to do for my final college class. We had to read pages out of the book; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. Look below for his view on being patient with others:

“Don’t pull up the flowers to see how the roots are doing.” Stephen R. Covey