Editorial
The Gifts We Don’t Have
I sat down late one night and wrote a list. The week had been a hard one—missed events, kids, chaos, catastrophes. Everything had frustrated me, and the ease with which I became frustrated had infuriated me. Why does letting myself become angry make me more angry than just about anything else?
So I made a list of where I was and where I needed to be. The two columns didn’t match up well at all. Most of the items led back to one significant discrepancy: I was so focused on what I wanted and how I wanted things done, that I was unwilling to let them flow the way others wanted or needed them done. The result was always the same— impatience leading to frustration, culminating with anger. Trying to stem the emotional freefall at anger wasn’t working; I needed to reverse course at impatience.
The problem, however, is that patience has never been one of my strengths, no matter how much I’ve been counseled to work on it. “Patience is a virtue,” my youth leaders and parents and teachers would say. “Well it’s not one of mine,” I would reply, thinking a snappy retort let me off the hook. Either people are born with patience or they’re not, I reasoned. And obviously I was not.
My line of reasoning certainly has some truth to it. I have met many people who come by patience (or faith, or discernment, or trust) with remarkable ease. To some is given one gift, to some another. Going back through the list of spiritual gifts laid out in Moroni 10, I am well aware that I did not come installed with most when I was born. Butthe lack of them hasn’t let me off any hooks. I may be low on original patience, but that doesn’t mean I’m not under injunction to develop some.
And so it goes for us all. We start where we are, with what we have. In the midst of losing a family member or struggling to bring another into this world, of discovering self or learning how to feel love, the women in this issue have reached beyond the things that come easily and grasped for the gifts that do not. They have moved—upward, onward; reversed, re-engaged—toward a better world, toward a more Christlike life.
Allyson Smith is the assistant prose editor of Segullah
