Unless you live in a part of the world in which the ambient temperature rarely varies, you have learned to be patient with the seasons.  You have learned that regardless of how you may dislike a particular time of year, it will go on as it must.  You'll not stop it.  You simply must live with it.
     As the northern climes of the planet move ever closer to spring and their southern counterparts to winter, I realize again, how critical patience is.  In a sound bite age driven by ever more rapid information dissemination and processing, we need to think about patience.  We need to look outside ourselves, we need to look beyond our immediate needs.  We need to take in the planet.  We must accede to bigger issues.
     When I contemplate the extraordinary order with which the earth's systems are endowed, and how much some of us struggle to change it, I think:  why?  If these systems were not in place, we would not be here.  If the world was entirely chaotic (and if this happened, it would not be a world as we like to think of one, anyway), we would be as absent as the passenger pigeon.  We need the order, we need the seasons.
     All we lack is patience.  Whether we believe in God or not, if we believe the universe required fourteen billion years to birth the world on which we live today, we understand that things do not happen quickly.  We understand that they will only happen as quickly as their patterns and constituents allow.  That's all they can do.
     That's all we can do, too.  We therefore humble ourselves before purposes of which we know not; we bow our minds and hearts to inevitabilities of which we do not know.  And in the end, we have a choice:  we can be patient with an unfathomable universe, or we can be patient with a knowable God.