"In Your Patience Possess Ye Your Souls"

Patience is a virtue. That’s what I have heard my entire life. It is a virtue that, unfortunately, I do not possess. I have never had patience in the kitchen, and that is why I don’t bake. With baking you have to be precise, you can’t rush the process. If you melt your butter your cookies come out flat. If you overbeat your cake it will dip in the middle. If you turn the heat high on your sugar you will burn your toffee. These are all reasons that I cook, instead of bake.
Patience is something that we must learn in order to endure our mortality. Being a parent is something that can test our patience every day. When my children were babies I couldn’t wait for them to hurry up and learn how to talk so that they could tell me what they wanted, and where they were hurting. That wish backfired when I was given one daughter with the gift of gab and the other one became a mild hypochondriac. How would things have been different if I had been more patient, and just enjoyed each step of the journey? 

In Luke 21:19, the Savior tells us to have patience in our souls. President Dieter F. Uchtdorf expanded on this passage in his talk “Continue in Patience” during the April 2010 General Conference. He said “Patience is a process of perfection. The Savior Himself said that in your patience you possess your souls. Or, to use another translation of the Greek text, in your patience you win mastery of your souls. Patience means to abide in faith, knowing that sometimes it is in the waiting rather than in the receiving that we grow the most. This was true in the time of the Savior. It is true in our time as well, for we are commanded in these latter days to “continue in patience until ye are perfected.”

So how do we win mastery of our souls? It isn’t something that most of us are born with. It is something that we have to continually work on. I was inpatient as a young mother, and I didn’t realize how hard that would be until my children were older and getting ready to graduate from High School. One day it just hit me, I had spent so much time wishing for my daughter to grow up that I didn’t enjoy the process. The hard times were hard, but I neglected to really take joy in the good things. When I became a mother again later, I decided to stop and enjoy it all. I have tried to win mastery of my mothering soul, even though it is not always easy. There are days when I would love to sell my little fournado to the gypsies if I knew any. But my perspective of what is and what isn’t important has changed. Since I know how fast it goes, I know that snuggles in the recliner are more important than the laundry that’s waiting to be folded, and bedtime stories are more important than the dinner dishes. While we are developing greater patience with our children, that mastery can flow over in to other areas of our lives. We can be more patient with our spouses and other family members. We can be more patient with our co-workers and other ward members. And maybe, we can even be more patient with ourselves.