Have Patience

I see that I am kind of slacking on the writing! L I might have mentioned this in one of the other posts… but it is because I go to bed right after dinner… and my ‘prime time’ for writing is after the hour of 9:00PM. But dinner is not until 8:30, and I have to wake up at 6:21 for morning mass. So after dinner, at 9:00 I have to do battle with my shower and get ready for bed. By the time I am ready for bed it is creeping up on 10:00 and I am left with only my 8 hours of sleep that I need to get to be able to function all day! So, eating dinner at 8:30 kind of puts a cramp in my writing… but I will see what I have in me before my ‘prime time’! J

I shall first start with a general update! Teaching is in full swing now, and I have had all of my classes a few times each. 4 classes of computer (2 are me showing, 2 are them working on an assignment I create), 3 classes of English, 3 classes of Math and 1 class of religion. This is all per week. Each class is about an hour or one and a half hours. These classes are being taught at the Vocational Training Center (VTC) and are for all of the different trades (electricity, carpentry, masonry, computers, printing, welding and auto mechanic). The students range from about 18 years old to 30 years old in my classes (the VTC students in general range from about 8 to 50 years old).

One thing I know I struggle with here is patience! I want to speak Arabic fluently… I want to be able to love fully... among a few other instances where I know my impatience can get the better of me! As the feast of Saint Francis was recently celebrated, I was thinking about his patience. I always see the saints as the guys up in heaven who did God’s will on earth (and rightly so, that is all true)… But I rarely think of their struggles… They were real humans; they sinned and had frustrations/hardships too! I always thought that if God came down and told me where I was going in life... life would be just peachy and I would never be frustrated or impatient again. But as I was praying about the life of Saint Francis, I thought about his calling. God said to him, “Francis, repair my church” So, here you have a man, who had a divine calling, ‘repair my church’. Life must have been easy after that right? Wrong! It must have taken even more patience than before the clear calling! How am I to rebuild? What do you mean? When? Where? These answers were not clearly given, as we know he started to rebuild the church at San Damiano, when God really meant HIS Church (I am not going to talk about this now… but also think about the INFINITE patience God has with us, and even his saints, too!). Now, I am not Saint Francis, so how this applies to me is in love. I get impatient here sometimes because I know I want to love to my full potential, but at times I catch myself being too impatient to pray for God to fill me with love first! It is impossible for us to love, if we first do not allow God to fill us with love! Yet, I find myself praying endlessly to be able to love everyone I see… but then I forget to pray for God to first fill me with love. It is as if I want to skip that vital step in the process of loving… I get impatient! L Much like the fabulous game Othello, ‘A minute to learn, a lifetime to master’ (it takes a minute to realize that we must allow God love us BEFORE we can lo

I talked about St. Francis because one, he is one of the best examples of how we humans can live as Christ-like as possible and two because it was his feast day… But I also thought about St. John Bosco (as I am a Salesian missionary). He had divinely inspired dreams, yet was never given a clear understanding of what they meant until he saw them lived out! Imagine the patience that took!! Having a vivid dream children turning into wolves and then into sheep, but not having a clear understanding of what it meant until years later when he witnessed as close to that as nature would give! Patience like I cant even imagine!!

Ill leave you with a life changing song! (okay, that may have been an exaggeration… but it’s a good one! Thank you Tracy for showing me this!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kn6Z2Mop5I

I was going to put up a few more pictures... but the internet is slow today, so maybe later this week I will post some pictures!