Hope in Patience

Patience has never really been my thing. I wish I was one of those chill, "come as it comes" people, but it didn't really come in my blood. As a little kid I was always really busy and into EVERYTHING. My patience, or rather lack of patience, truly showed in my young years as I went from project to project. My siblings would beg me to play Mario Party with them just so they could have four players. If I was doing bad, which was often, I would throw my controller across the room and turn off the TV, losing all of the progress. Needless to say, I had and still have a lot to work on!

Patience is defined as the ability to remain calm when waiting for a long time or when dealing with problems or difficult people. Nobody enjoys waiting. Waiting, I feel, does nothing but build a huge pit in your stomach. Sometimes waiting mends the heart,  when other times it destroys you. Hope is the one thing that minimizes your pit. No matter the situation~ there is always hope. This summer I had a couple really painful episodes with lower back pain. I had always been super accident prone so I figured I did something to it while I was messing around or something. I iced it and hoped for the best. The pain would come in spurts. I prayed and prayed for it to go away. But it didn't. My patience was pretty much non-existent. Tender mercies began to pour in. Hope was my main man, I felt like. After getting into a doctor that was near impossible to get into he couldn't figure it out right on the spot. X-RAYS were taken and still nothing. The next step was an MRI. As I went in to the most constricting place I have ever been, tears rolled down my face. I didn't have much hope any more. Church songs came to my mind. Patience was whispered in my head. As I waited nervously for the doctor to tell me the results, so many emotions ran through my body. Fear, hope, anxiety, and about everything in between. As I waited on that annoying paper on the bed in the doctor's office it felt like hours had passed. He finally came in. He pulled up the MRI and showed me that I had a slight tear in my lower back. He did some pressure point tests and gave me the verdict. "Well Olivia," he said, "You have Fibromyalgia." He then explained it as joint problems and chronic, wide spread pain through my entire body. Everything seemed to come together. For 8 years I was waiting for this day. Since I was 14 I have always known I was different and there it was. Patience. Patience is key. Hope. Hope is everything.