I was just thinking about ...
Patience:
A Necessity, Not A Virtue
I was reading about a friend of mine who enjoyed
teasing her cats by letting hunt the birds through the window at her house.
Hilarious, I've done similar things myself. That brought a story to mind and
thought to go with it.
I was making a chocolate cake and was just
scraping the melted baking chocolate into the mix when my youngest son, Mitch,
came in the kitchen. "Ooh, chocolate, can I lick the spatula,"
"It's not ready yet, you won't like it," I warned. He insisted that he
would...so, I said okay. My wife gave me one of those looks as if to say,
"I can't believe you're doing this to that poor child." (He was only 6
at the time.) But this was a harmless way to give a valuable lesson, not to
mention it should be fun to watch.
He latched onto the spatula
and, with one lick, cleaned one whole side of the spatula. Then he just stood
there, motionless; the tongue wasn't even moving. But it certainly wasn't going
to back into his mouth, not with that pollution all over it. His eyes that had
already been wide with excitement now grew wider as panic set in. You could
almost hear the warning sirens going off in his head.
The drool machine suddenly turned on. And
saliva began to roll over his tongue and splat on the floor, as if in a feeble
attempt to cleanse the afflicted tongue. His taste buds, already in revolt, were
on the edge of collapse when he could take it no longer. He moved over to a hand
towel and began to lick the towel, wiping his tongue off on it. The look on his
face was similar to Tom Hanks' in the movie "Big", when he took a big
bite of Caviar; only to sputter and spit it out and scrape his tongue with his
fingers and a napkin.
Though hard to stop laughing, I finally did. (He was still wiping his tongue
with the towel.) "It didn't taste too good, did it?" "That's
gross, yuck!" was his reply. "Just remember," I continued,
"a lot of things are like cake. You have to wait until they're ready or you
won't enjoy them.” He still remembers that occasion to this day.
But isn't life like that. Some ingredients are sweet, but so many more are
tasteless, sour, bitter or just plain gross. I'm thinking egg, here, raw and
swishing around in your mouth, through the teeth, under the tongue, okay, enough
of that. And just like the cake, you have to wait for it to be blended and
heated through hardships. Then it is indeed a treat that proves to be
irresistible.
Patience isn't just a virtue; it's a necessity when enjoying life to the
fullest. Now go out and have a slice of life on me.
Come
by anytime, I’ll be and so will God.
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