Patience Taught, Patience Learned

A group of four of us were tasked with performing a program on the Doulos around the theme of "abundant life" at a Christian youth class. Unfortunately one of our team members came under the weather at the last minute so there were only three of us to entertain sixty teenagers for a couple hours.  As I've been learning, outreach rarely goes according to plan so we just worked around it. 

One of our team members, an older gentleman (whom I'll call John) was not willing to perform some of the skits and activities we had planned on doing. With a furrowed brow and folded arms he exclaimed, "I don't do skits. I can never remember what I'm supposed to do and I always miss my cue." I found myself frustrated at the fact that we not only had one less person on the team but that John was unwilling to be flexible. I prayed, please give me the patience to deal with John. Rather than bashing heads, myself and my other team member tried to help John overcome his disinterests. We reassured him that he could fulfill the task with a little practice. We went over the drama skit several times to make sure he knew what to do. 

After our program we were to break down into groups and discuss with the kids what they thought living an abundant life meant. To support our topic, John suggested using some rope to show some knot tying tricks. The rope tricks seemed impossible but by sleight of hand worked like magic. The idea was to illustrate that nothing is impossible with God. I humored John having him show me the seemingly simple tricks. I watched him put the end of a string through a loop without ever feeding it through the loop in the first place. Baffled, I couldn't figure out where the sleight of hand was. I watched over and over but still couldn't figure it out. Without getting annoyed, John repeated the exercise until I could figure it out. The person whom we had to demonstrated patience to earlier was not showing patience in return. It was a humbling moment.

A volunteer picked us up and brought us to the youth program. For a couple hours we ran our program and John was able to help out with the skit that we practiced. I gave a testimony of how I came to my faith. 

We talked about our experience working on the Doulos and the joy of serving those in need around the world. Afterwards we broke into groups and I had to facilitate a discussion with about twenty teenagers. It was definitely a challenge to keep their attention as they grew distracted and antsy. Just as our discussion ran out of steam, I busted out an art history book to show them a painting by Rembrandt of Jesus crossing the Sea of Galilee. They became engaged and it helped them visualize our topic of discussion. All in all, we had a great time. 

 

I never ended up needing to use the rope tricks. But through out the day, it was clear that acting out of patience rather than frustration can work through any challenge.