Have you ever had a week where even though nothing big went wrong you still felt like you were trying to walk upstream in a river? This has been one of those weeks. I can’t tell you anything out of the ordinary that has happened this week, but I feel like each day has been a bit of a stuggle in my own mind.

Last weekend we took a little trip with the family. It was Canadian Thanksgiving and my wife’s family has a reunion each year over the holiday. We usually try to find somewhere that is kind of central to everyone so that we all have to travel a little bit but nobody has to travel the whole distance. We try to rent a house that has enough room for everyone so we can cook meals together and spend more time together. A few years ago the family found a place with room for everyone and it is right on a lake. It is perfect for us. So we loaded up our bags and our kids and got into the car. The weather was nice and it looked like the roads should be great. We were going to be driving through the rocky mountains and the trees were starting to change colour so I was looking forward to a beautiful drive.

It’s a little more than a two-hour drive to get to the house. We hadn’t been in the car for 15 minutes when the usual questions started coming from the back seats. If you have every travelled with children you may know what I am talking about. Are we there yet? how much longer? where are we now? I’m bored. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I need to go potty. When will we be there? How many minutes is that? Are we on a mountain? I’m tired. Is it my turn yet? Are we almost to the border? why do we have to stop at the border? Can I roll my window down? Why can’t I roll my window down? At times it felt like the questions would never stop coming. At one point our youngest child was asking so many questions I was concerned that he wasn’t getting enough oxygen to his brain because he wouldn’t stop talking long enough to take a breath.

Do you remember President Uchtdorf’s Conference talk in April of 2010 where he talked about the marshmallow experiment? A professor at Stanford University wanted to test the will power of four-year-old children. He put a large marshmallow in front of them and told them they could eat the marshmallow, or if they could wait for 15 minutes then they could have two marshmallows. Well at this moment, sitting in the car with my three kids, I would have bet you that they would have had that marshmallow in their mouth before the researchers had even finished explaining the situation to them. My wife and I have talked to our kids about trying to learn patience, but it often feels more like a test of our patience trying to teach them patience.

Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin said, “Too often, we are impatient with ourselves, with our family members and friends, and even with the Lord. We seem to demand what we want right now, regardless of whether we have earned it, whether it would be good for us, or whether it is right.”

I think my impatience is part of why I have had such a struggle this week. That is one of the tools that satan uses on me quite often. It is so easy to feel frustrated and impatient especially when the things we are working on are righteous goals. Those goals could be things like, trying to improve our scripture study, finding an answer to a question or problem that we have, or trying to develop a Christlike attribute that we need to work on.

I have been trying to be better at listening to the promptings of the spirit. In the past few months a few of the promptings that I have followed have led to, as far as I know, absolutely nothing. That makes me feel frustrated and impatient. Why didn’t this lead to anything? At other times I think that things should have turned out very differently than they have. I haven’t been upset with the Lord. At times I have been confused and sometimes upset with myself though. This is usually where satan really gets me. I start to think that I have done something wrong. I should have done it differently, or maybe not at all. I start to feel like whatever I am doing is never going to amount to much.

I need to be more patient. But I don’t think the patience I need is the same as the patience I wanted my children to have on our drive. I just wanted them to sit back and enjoy the drive through the beautiful fall scenery or find something to amuse themselves until we got to the lake. That doesn’t work in my case. Revelation and spiritual assistance has never come to me when I was sitting on my backside watching television. I need to be doing something.

I think patience means more than I thought. I used to think it meant, “please wait patiently and the Lord will be with you shortly”, kinda like I was sitting in some kind of Celestial waiting room. But patience will do us little good if we are just sitting around reading a random magazine waiting for something to come to us. Patience does not mean idleness. Patience means putting enough trust in the Lord to keep going, and keep doing, even when we don’t see the results we were looking for, or when things turn out differently than we expected.

Elder Uchtdorf shared an experience he had when he was 10 years old. His family had moved to West Germany. His school subjects in this new place were different from what he had been taking. He had to learn new history, geography, and English instead of Russian as a second language. He started to get behind in school and began to wonder if he wasn’t smart enough. It was a patient teacher who taught him to be persistent, and he found that with consistent effort even difficult subjects became clearer.

“From that experience, I learned that patience was far more than simply waiting for something to happen—patience required actively working toward worthwhile goals and not getting discouraged when results didn’t appear instantly or without effort.

patience is not passive resignation, nor is it failing to act because of our fears. Patience means active waiting and enduring. It means staying with something and doing all that we can—working, hoping, and exercising faith; bearing hardship with fortitude, even when the desires of our hearts are delayed. Patience is not simply enduring; it is enduring well!”
Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Patience is active! It requires us to be working towards our goals, seeking our own answers and being patient instead of getting discouraged if things don’t work out how we expect, or in the timeframe we had hoped.

“…let us lay aside every weight, and the ​​​sin​ which doth so easily ​​​beset​ ​us,​ and let us run with ​​​patience​ the race that is set before us.”
Hebrews 12:1

So I guess I have been the impatient kid in the back of the heavenly car. Asking, “how much longer?” and, “What are we doing here?”. I need to trust in the driver. Listening to and following Him has gotten me to where I am today and I love where I am at, even when it gets hard. I need to be patiently working (oooh I kinda like the sound of that) and striving to be a little better each day. I trust that in the end it won’t matter where I end up or what I end up doing because I will be a little closer to Him.