Cultivating Patience III-Learning to Trust leritaheart September 22, 2016

Cultivating Patience III-Learning to Trust

As I yearn for more vitality and verve,  I remember that patience is also about trust.  It is trust that after all of the waiting, a healing outcome awaits me.  I believe that someday my full energy will return and I will use it for something that moves me beyond a life that necessarily focuses on my schedule, my personal needs and desires.  Waiting tends to highlight everything that isn’t working or feeling right without considering that it is likely to change tomorrow.

By accepting the call to the transplant journey and all of the lessons that it entailed, I learned to trust that whatever I needed would be provided.  I trusted that a new heart would arrive before the old one ceased.  I trusted that a kidney donor would emerge so I wouldn’t be tied to a dialysis machine three times a week.  I believed that somehow the bills would be paid even though I couldn’t work during my recoveries from various illnesses.

It is easy to lose patience, to get caught up in the “I want it now” world that whirls around me.  From the depths of a life absent of delayed gratification, I attempt to exert my own will over time and how it operates, over doctors and pharmacies and how they quickly they take care of me.  I desire cashiers to move quickly, to promptly take care of the people ahead of me in the grocery store line or at the local cafe.  I want people to hurry at the ATM, to fill their gas tanks at record speed.  I, like many people wish everyone and everything would move faster because my plans  do not allow for too much waiting.   Yet if errors occur I’d be the first to become outraged by a perceived incompetence.  I suppose I have not totally embraced the lessons I thought I had mastered about trust from my many years of waiting.

I wonder why I am so resistant to the trust inherent in the practice of patience, why I must rehearse it like a piano lesson or sports training.  Certainly to develop strong trust, I must engage in smaller acts of surrender.  I recall the times when the anesthesiologist placed the mask on my face in the OR and told me to count down from 10.  I  trusted that I would wake up somewhere and see the familiar faces of those I loved.  I hoped that there would be an end to my suffering and I would return to my normal schedule of waking up in my own bed, preparing breakfast, driving to work, or just sitting on my deck before a forest of trees and singing birds.

Last time I took a silent retreat, I stumbled across a book on the crowded book shelves of the large reading lounge/kitchenette, a room filled with overstuffed couches, padded lounging and rocking chairs with a window open to endless bird watching.  In Jesus, A New Vision-Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship, Marcus Borg states that faith must move beyond mere belief and become radical trust in God, an unprecedented reliance on the Force of Love that created me, us, and the universe.  Radical trust in something other than myself, doctors, and  medications is essential to my experience of peace and joy.  The idea of letting go used to be scary.  Now knowing that I don’t have to manage or take care of everything is comforting.

As I prepared for my first transplant I engaged in a series of conversations with my heart.  My old heart, so full of wisdom whispered to me one day that there were four things I needed to master to successfully survive a transplant and thrive for rest of my life.   “Listen, trust, patience, and surrender” it murmured.  Pause, be still and listen to the guidance that is always present.  Trust the still, quiet voice of inner wisdom over the many chanting voices that emerge from old wounds, fresh wounds, shortsighted family or friends and the media.  Be patient since my timing may not coincide with a Universal timing.  And surrender–give up trying to control everything because it is simply impossible.

Thus, surrender is essential to the trust required for patience.  It’s the relinquishing control over how and when the healing will unfold and accepting each day as it comes instead of creating relentless plans that are frequently uprooted by life.  Yes, life—traffic delays, a sudden phone call announcing that a loved one is terminally ill, a friend needing bail money or sobbing because a spouse has filed for divorce.  I cannot change circumstances but I am able to listen for my role in assuaging the suffering be it a loving and peaceful presence, a listening ear or temporary holder of anguish and anxious concern.

I don’t like suspense, a sense of not knowing.  I don’t like dwelling in the liminal space—not there yet but not here anymore.  I am more comfortable with predictability.  Yet I believe that some unseen Force is working somewhere, somehow with me to orchestrate my life.

Trust and patience—two interconnected paths that need nurturance and work, and hours of practice, going over the same ground again and again and again.  So in what areas do you need to cultivate trust?  Do you possess the trust that patience demands?  How can trust and patience help to eliminate or dissipate anxiety, anxiousness, or sadness and allow you to feel more of the Peace and Joy in your heart?

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