A Brief Prayer for Patience
I’m taking another crack at attending seminary, kinda-sorta. I haven’t decided what specific program I’d like to do, so I’m currently a non-degree-seeking student. I tried two classes at once a couple years ago but ran head-first into a wall that I still don’t understand, and it took me awhile to recover. Right now I’m trying a single class focused on writing.
Our first assignment was a short introductory post (the class is asynchronous and online) which was to include a brief prayer, be it of thanksgiving or something more future-facing. I chose the latter, and tried to address one of my biggest difficulties with writing. As always, I wonder if I’m even conceptualizing the problem correctly, but I have to start somewhere.
I’ve left out the blatantly identifiable stuff, but it’s not the point anyway.
As I begin this semester, I’m making a prayer for patience. Not with myself just in general, but with what I think up. An idea is often something I have to outrun, like a fuse. If I let it get past me, it’s not that I’ll forget it. It’s that it’ll stop mattering. Communicating thus becomes this tug-of-war between getting things out coherently but still quickly enough that I’m not sick of the thought before I’m done. Growing up, I found writing papers interminable, as it involved forcing myself to sit down and type out something that was already formed in my head. It’s like if you’ve written something out only for the computer (or your dog?) to eat it, so you have to re-do it. That feeling of tedium at treading ground you’ve already discovered is how it can often feel for me to try to convey an idea that’s fully developed. If you happen to notice during a Zoom session that I talk fast, this is certainly part of why. It’s no small part of why my “process” for academic writing has been sitting down the night before something’s due and just blasting through whatever first thought pops into my head. Outlining, revising, and all of that never entered into it. Teachers in school (and even college) let me get away with this, but I’m hoping y’all won’t.
So it is that I hope that I can get to know these things that come to me a little better, sit with them a little longer. I’m doing these parts of myself a disservice by not giving them more space to grow, by judging them far too quickly. And it’s not a matter of being afraid of what I’ll find or anything like that, it’s just so hard to sit with something that’s no longer being discovered. It’s in the past now, and while there’s nothing to say I’ll never think of it again, there are so many new things just over the next hill!
Such a prayer is, at least in this case, something thrown out there without my even beginning to know how it’s to be done. It’s also an admission (or at least a complaint) of powerlessness. Simply willing ourselves to feel differently does not lead anywhere good. Similarly, I don’t want to overstate the control I have over what ideas come to me or when. At the same time, I tend to see patience as an overly passive thing. Or better said, it feels that way, even if intellectually I know that it doesn’t have to be. Either way, it’s difficult to just throw my wish into the ether and hope for the best. I’ve long believed that we have to meet God halfway (or as close as we’re able, at least), but as with so many things, this may turn out to be a case of drawing lines in the wrong place. In other words, it could be true in some respects, not true in this (limited) one, but still be true in the way that matters.
I was about to say that “all I can do is what I can do,” but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? In this case, maybe it’s about not doing something. Amen.