Impatience – as a mark of immaturity – Sunday, March 18, 1956
A thoughtful physician recently remarked: “I used to think of impatience as simply a natural part of some people’s personality, but over the years I have come to conclude that habitual impatience is a mark of immaturity. “1
The pressures of life are on all of us at times, and often it would seem that these pressures are the 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, and black looks, and sometimes bad language, are both symptoms and results of pressures 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 most pity in men is—action prompted by surprise of anger.”2 And Aristotle offered this observation: “Anybody 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 everybody’s power and is not easy.”3
Too many of us too often are too touchy, too quick to retaliate, too quick to shoot back sharp replies. True, there is pressure; there is competition; and often there are 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 also.
The whole temper of the times suggests that we relax a little and give ourselves time to think fairly and judiciously before we jump to quick conclusions and lose our tempers and show our immaturity with rude utterance or ill-considered action.
In the words of Peter, who had to learn the lesson of patience: “. . . add to your faith virtue; and 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.”4
And finally, remember that petty and impetuous impatience is a mark of immaturity.
1Dr. Harold Lee Snow.
2Robert Browning, A Forgiveness.
3Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. ii, ch. 9.
4II Peter 1:5-7.
March 18, 1956
Broadcast Number 1,387