Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Hello and welcome to imagine the possibilities. My name is Skip Pogue. Today we're going to talk about patience. The dictionary defines patience as the capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble or suffering without getting angry or upset.
[00:00:19] Now, I've talked about several times about my personal relationship with Goddesse. And every once in a while, God decides that something I'm doing needs a little tune up.
[00:00:33] A lesson needs to be learned.
[00:00:36] So I had planned on going to Walmart and picking up some hamburgers and hot dogs and stuff, but I didn't go. I lost track of time. So I planned on going the next morning, but I stayed up kind of late. Woke up, and I woke up around 08:00 but I decided I could rest for just a few minutes. Well, when I woke up again and looked at the clock, it was ten minutes till ten.
[00:01:04] As I was looking at the clock, the fire went off. It did. Just went dark. So I got up and checked, and sure enough, we had no power. I'm up and I can't fix coffee.
[00:01:16] I got my phone out, logged onto the Gibson EMC app and my account, and tells me you have a power outage. I gotta love this company. They know the minute it went off and had already dispatched a crew to the cause of the trouble. So I decided to wait. Power comes back on about 11:00 and I decided I'm gonna have a cup of coffee before I go to Walmart. So I fix a cup and actually, I have two cups before I leave. I get ready and all that stuff, and I arrive at Walmart and it's about 01:00 and I just need a few things, right? So church is out and the parking lot's packed, as is the store. I start shopping, and the first aisle I go down has a lady with the. With her buggy. I'm from the south. It's a buggy in the middle of the aisle, and she's studying all the items on the shelf. I stand there as I'm about to say something, another lady comes up. And the two ladies start talking, and they're talking about what this lady's looking for and everything. And the second lady goes by me and stops right in front of me and starts looking at stuff on the side of the aisle.
[00:02:29] Neither of them say anything to me. I'm about ready to say something. And God says, no, no, you don't. You just wait. Be patient. And today's lesson had begun anyway. All of a sudden, they both look at me kind of like they were surprised to see me there. They apologize and offer to move out of the way. I tell them, take your time. God's teaching me a lesson on patience and that it's all fine. They finish up, move on. So do I. I go to the next aisle, and guess what? It's blocked. Same thing. It's almost like I'm invisible until God's ready to continue the lesson. Then bam. Oh, I'm sorry. Didn't see you standing there. I'll move. No need. God's teaching me a lesson on patience. So I'll wait. I do so and feel calmer about the whole deal. They move and I move. I'll three. Here we go again. A couple going one way and two different ladies the other. I'm behind the ladies, and then everyone stops. I must have taken on my cloak of invisibility again. Cause nobody says anything to me or even notices. I'm standing there waiting. Bing, bang, boom. And they see me. Everyone offers to move, but I tell them, it's okay. God's teaching me a lesson, and it's fine. They get what they need, move on. As a couple passes me, the gentleman asked how the lesson is working. And I told him, it's working great. And I'm really not in a hurry and enjoying my day. Anyway, this happens a couple more times. And finally I'm at the checkout. The cashier is extremely nice and asked me about my day. I tell her about my lesson. She tells me, you couldn't have had a better teacher. Wow, I'm really enjoying my day. She rings everything up. I pay her head for the car, put the groceries in and start home. Get about halfway home and run into road construction. No problem. Take my time. And I'm completely relaxed about it. All of a sudden, God says, okay, now keep working on what I taught you. God is good all the time. So that was my lesson in patience. And patience is really important. How many times have we got our shorts in a bunch over something that amounted to nothing? How many times have we. The definition talks about getting angry. How many times have we gotten angry with someone or over something that upset us simply because it didn't happen in our time frame? Think about it. I mean, we gotta have patience. And it applies to so many different events. Have we failed to have patience with our children when they were little? When they were in middle school, high school, college, fully grown? Do we fail to be patient with them at times? How about grandchildren? How about friends, family members? Think of the number of times that we get upset, frustrated or angry over something that doesn't amount to anything. So we get delayed five minutes. It's nothing. It's not a big deal. In reality, it's just not a big deal. So we need to learn to relax. Think about it. I guarantee you, when we get angry, we had our doctor with us, and they had one of those cuffs and everything, checked our heart rate and our blood pressure. When our lack of patience kicks in, I guarantee you it's higher. Our heart rate's higher. We're affecting our health, I can tell you. I can assure you that, because when I see the doctor, and I've got a great doctor, and she's a good personal friend, she always checks my blood pressure. Actually, the nurse does it first, and if need be, she'll check it. This particular day, I driven from the house to the doctor's office, my patients. This was before my lesson, actually. My patience wasn't good, and I was frustrated in traffic. I got there just when my appointment was supposed to be, walked up to the desk, and just as I did, the nurse hollered at me and said, come on back. Went back, sat down. Hadn't got the rest to relax or anything. Sat down. She took my blood pressure. It was high, both sides. That was high. My heart rate was like 90 something. And she tried. She said, something's wrong. Your blood pressure's normally real good. And I told her, I said, I got upset driving in here.
[00:07:14] And she said, well, maybe you just need to sit and relax a little bit, and we'll take it again a little bit. And I said, okay. So Brenda came in. Brenda is my wife, but Brenda is also not my Brenda, but another Brenda is that confusing? Is my doctor. So Brenda came in, and she looked at the chart, and she said, your blood pressure is through the roof. And I said, I know it. And I explained what happened. She said, have you been sitting here calming yourself down? I said, I have. She said, you want to try to take it now or you want to wait a few minutes? I said, how about we just wait a few more minutes? So she checked some other stuff and everything, made sure my medications were where they were supposed to be and all. And then she took my blood pressure, and it was perfect. It was right where it normally is. I'd calm down, but that affected me, and that's a health issue. It's important that we're patient about stuff. I mean, think about that. I got upset enough that it affected both my blood pressure and my heart rate. I'm not a young guy anymore. I quit running marathons. Well, actually, I quit running marathons before I started running marathons. So, anyway, I won't go there anyway. If you look at everything, being patient is so important, and it's so easy now. God had to teach me, give me my lesson, patience. And once I went through that, I now understand and I try to be patient, and I'm successful 99% of the time. Every once in while, I'll backslide or whatever you want to call it, slip up.
[00:08:48] And usually it's over nothing. Literally, it's over nothing. And had I just relaxed, it would have been fine. But we need to have patience with our family. How many times have we probably hurt a family member's feelings or something because of impatience or not wanting to wait? You know you want to, oh, we got to leave at exactly 07:00. And your brother in law and his wife show up and it's 07:01. And so we're. They moved from their car to your car and we're off and at 07:02, but somebody's, somebody's excited about the fact we're late leaving. How many times have we been impatient with our kids? Because they. We holler. We holler at them. That's a bad way. We. Yeah, holler's all right. We holler at them to come in or come to dinner, and we're seated at the table waiting on them, and they show up a minute, two minutes after we hollered at them and we say something to them about, hey, I called you. 30 minutes to go. You know, we do tend to do that.
[00:09:54] So we're upset and they don't understand, especially if they're fairly young. They don't have any idea what they did, why we're upset with them. You hollered, they came. Nobody's eating or anything. Nobody's going to starve to death. They don't see the reason for it. How many times have we been impatient with a co worker or not been patient with them? We're trying to, maybe we've been asked to teach them how to use a reporting system and we're trying to show them and they're not catching on as fast as we think they should. And we forget that we probably were the same way when we went through the training. We've now been using the system for five years. So we know. And we're saying, here's all you gotta do, everybody. And. And there's. I don't get it. Wait a minute. What?
[00:10:43] Well, would you pay attention? I'm trying to show you how to do this. You're not paying attention. I mean, if you don't want to do this right now or you don't want to do it at all, you know, let me know. And so now we're picking on them. We've embarrassed them, hurt their feelings, probably triggered them, whatever the thing is, and they don't know why. I. So just think about that and think about the fact that everybody's not going to get a lesson from God. Everybody doesn't need a lesson from God. Everybody just needs to get patience. If you do, you know, you can ask God to help you with your patience. I got help and didn't even ask him. Didn't know I was doing anything wrong until he pointed it out. But that's okay, too. But, you know, it's important to everybody that we be patient and that we accept things will go wrong. Times will not necessarily be perfect. We can't get there. Oh, we've got a reservation at 07:00 and we look at our watch and it's going to be five minutes after seven. The chances are the restaurant's not going to give your reservation away. Now, if it's a restaurant you go to all the time, they give you a reservation way, then I'd have a chat about their level of customer service, especially repeat customer service. Just think about it. It's not, it's not rocket science. It's just doing what we ought to do. And it's easy, it's really simple. It's one of those things. And anger is a side effect if we're impatient or if we're not patient enough.
[00:12:25] I gave you that example, and I'm sure there's, there was time that I could have told you 50, given you 50 different examples of my impatience. And it wasn't with people.
[00:12:38] It was with things that happened that I felt inconvenienced. And because I was inconvenienced, I was angry. You know, the road I live on speed limit's 55 miles an hour. I use my cruise control from the time I leave the city limits until I get to my house. 55 miles an hour. Now, I think everybody should drive 55 miles an hour. There's people who drive 65 miles an hour and they pass me. There's people who drive 45 miles an hour and I run up behind them and I have to drive a mile behind them to get to my driveway. And I know when I do it, I can feel it, that I'm starting to get upset. And I have to think about it, calm myself down, stay calm, don't get upset. God will take you back to Walmart if you do, and teach you it again, teach it all over again. And I don't need that. So, you know, it's just one of those things that it's not hard to do. And the benefits of it are, I already know there's a health benefit to not getting impatient, getting angry. I already know that. My doctor and I talked about that, and I realized when my blood pressure was up and my heart rate was up, that's a serious issue. I was probably in my seventies then, and I don't want my heart rate and blood pressure to go up. I don't need that. So health wise, making people feel okay about themselves and happy. I know with Brenda, not my doctor, my wife this time, there are times that I've been impatient with her. I ask her a question, or she makes. She asks me something, and I answer back, and we wind up having a longer discussion about it than we should. And it's not her, it's me. I want the answer. It's like, I'm gonna go. I get, like, I'm gonna go pick us up something for lunch. What would you like? Well, what do you want? Well, it doesn't matter to me. What would you like? I don't know. And I'm like, it's not. I'm in a hurry. I mean, I'm retired. I don't have to get in a hurry, but I'll get impatient. And on occasion, I've hurt her feelings because of that. And that's wrong. So just think about all of it and try to be more patient with people, more tolerant. Don't get angry because there's another part to it. Nine times out of ten, maybe 99 times out of a hundred, I don't know. But I can sure say nine times out of ten, we get upset. The person we're upset with, like the driver on the highway, has no earthly idea I'm upset at. They don't care. They don't know. They don't care. I don't have flashing lights or anything, you know, that says, hey, I'm upset with you. Move it, bub. You don't drive 55. You know? What's the matter with you? Doesn't do me any good. Doesn't do them any good. My wife laughs about it every once while. Cause I say something about a driver doing something stupid. And she said, do you think they heard you? And I said, no, they didn't hear me. And she said, why are you upset? I'm like, I'm not upset. She's like, yes, you are, and I am upset for no reason other than I'm not being patient. So just think about all that. I want to wrap this thing up. I hope that's helpful somehow. I hope this helps you because it helped me. Talking about it, I can tell you that just telling the story back when I had my lesson, patience and just thinking about it and expressing it helped me. I now know I've been reinforced. It's been reinforced with me. So moving forward, I'm going to feel better about it. So hopefully you're the same way, that you understand a little bit more about it and you could think about it under with a different light shining on it. How's that? Anyway, in closing, I want to thank you, and I've said this every time, but I am as sincere as the day is long. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to my podcast. I want to thank those that have commented on the website on imagine the possibilities life. I want to thank you for the comments, thank you for the encouragement and stuff I appreciate and just continue to listen to them. I'm going to try to help people. I've said all along that's the driving force behind this and hopefully you picked some nugget out of this that will help you. So just remember that your future belongs to you. Be kind, stay humble, love deeply, and laugh often. I hope that you have a super day and I pray that God blesses you in a super way. Thanks again.
