From “Thoughts for One-Hundred Days”, Richard L. Evans wrote:
A thoughtful physician remarked: “I used to think of impatience as simply a natural part of some peoples personality, but over the years I have come to conclude that habitual impatience is a mark of immaturity.” 91
The pressures of life are on all of us at times, and often it would seem that these pressures are a cause of impatience. But there is also something of a cycle—for as the pressures increase impatience, impatience increases the pressures—and impatience on the part of one person causes impatience on the part of other people. Tense nerves, caustic comments, blaring horns, black looks, and bad language are symptoms and results of pressure and impatience, as we say things we shouldn’t say and do things for which we are soon sorry.
Robert Browning wrote: “The thing I must pity—-is action prompted by surprise of anger.”92 And Aristotle offered this observation: “Anyone can become angry—that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose and in the right way—that is not within everyone’s power and is not easy.”93
Too many of us are often too touchy, too quick to retaliate, too quick to shoot back sharp replies. True, there is pressure; and there is competition; and often there is seriously pressing problems. But impatience is seldom the answer—for the person who lives impatiently is himself increasingly uncomfortable and adds to the tension and tempers of everyone around him, and often creates serious hazards for himself and others. The whole temper of the times suggests that we relax a little and give ourselves time to think fairly and judicially before we jump to quick conclusions and lose our tempers and show our immaturity with rude utterance and ill-considered action.
In the words of Peter, who had to learn the lessons of patience. “. . . add to your faith virtue; to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge, temperance; and to temperance, patience; and to patience, godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity.”94 And finally, remember that petty and impetuous impatience is a mark of immaturity. ~Richard L. Evans, Thoughts for One Hundred Days (Salt Lake City: Publishers Press, 1966), 140-41 91. Dr. Harold Lee Snow, 140 92. Robert Browning, A Forgiveness, 93. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 94. II Peter 1:5-7 (language modernized)
