Strength and Patience
Practicing Awareness of Our Impatience
Reflection By Scott Stoner
Is everything as urgent as your stress would imply?
- Carrie Latet, poet
The Strength quadrant of the Living Compass Model of Well-Being focuses on Care for the Body and Resilience. It can be especially challenging this time of year to make good decisions in these two areas of wellness. Most of us find that we have to be particularly intentional about caring for our physical wellness and managing our stress as we negotiate the holiday season.
There is a reciprocal relationship between stress and impatience. High stress levels can lead to being more impatient—with ourselves and others. Likewise, being impatient can lead to higher stress levels, which can, in turn, drain our energy.
In our Living Compass resources, we often talk about how our faith acts as our compass in life. When we make our faith our compass in all areas of wellness, we will experience the peace that God intends for us. During this time of year, there are many other “compasses” competing to guide our decisions. The pull of our consumer culture can have a strong influence on us, as can the pull of our families, friends, and others. Other people’s ideas of how we “should” be celebrating Christmas often differ from our own, and if we are not mindful, we may find our levels of stress and impatience growing.
Making It Personal: Take a moment to write down a few thoughts on what it means for you to make the compass of your faith/spirituality your primary compass for Advent and Christmas. Do you see a relationship between using faith/spirituality as your compass, and having more patience?
TO JOIN OUR PRIVATE FACEBOOK DISCUSSION GROUP FOR ADVENT, CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW:
Follow along with us this Advent season with our daily devotional and engage in discussion in our closed facebook group moderated by Robbin Brent, Carolyn Karl, Jan Kwiatowski, and Scott Stoner.
In this group, participants will have a chance to share their responses to the prompts in the daily readings, and also the chance to receive additional material for reflection.