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The Breaths of Life

Patience is not one of my virtues.  Lack of it is probably one of my more glaring faults.  While I have spent much time in my life praying for patience, persuaded to continue to do so by a priest friend when I was about to give up (or run the risk, he felt, of losing my trust in God’s willingness to respond to our prayers 😊) that particular prayer has not, as yet, been answered. 

The first reading today is from a man who had endless patience – we’ve all heard (and likely used) the saying ‘the patience of Job.’ Job is from the land of Uz.  He had a good life – a large, close-knit family; plenty of livestock; and many servants. In the first chapter of the Book of Job he is described as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”  We learn that Satan believes this to be so only because of his circumstances in life.  To prove such is not the case, God allows Satan to turn Job’s life upside down, rendering him penniless, without his family, left miserable and desperate and it is at this point that we meet him in today’s reading.  If you were to continue to read from there, you would learn that despite all the adversity that Job experiences, all his many sufferings, he remains faithful to God.  At the conclusion of the book, God rewards Job by making his life even better than it was before.  Job was indeed blessed because of having great patience.

What strikes me today, however, from the reading we hear, is not Job’s patience, but his wisdom.  “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle … my life is a breath.”  The older I get the more I become aware that I have far fewer days in front of me than behind me.  Time passes way too quickly, and the years fly by not as slowly as they once seemed to. Life, I have realized for some time, is indeed but a breath.  I know, logically, that each breath I take could be my last, and try to remind myself of that every morning.  THIS day is a gift – I may have no other.  I ask myself: How would I live if I really understood that to be a truth?  Experience has taught me that somehow we all believe we are invincible, despite all proof to the contrary.

At times I am able to live with gratitude for the many blessings that fill my world – the love and support of family and friends; the material comforts that allow me to be sheltered, feed, watered; the means to travel and be entertained; the faith that gives me hope and comfort.  Still, as often as I succeed in living that way, I also fail to do so.  Something doesn’t work the way I want it to; someone doesn’t respond the way I expect them to; tasks aren’t completed as quickly or efficiently as I desire.  And my response is impatience, or worse.  Gratitude disappears. 

We are here for a breath.  In his book The Winners, Fredrik Backman says: “We can’t stop the first and last breaths we take any more than we can stop the wind.” So I ask, how do we live the breath of time we get between those two breaths?  How do we WANT to live them? Are we anywhere near to doing that?  And, if not, are we willing to make the changes in our lives we need to, to achieve that? Many years ago I remember someone saying ‘I want to live my life so that there is standing room only at my funeral.’  Me … I’m going to aim for that.

~Ellen Bennett, St. Elizabeth of the Trinity Pastoral Unit