Simplicity, patience and compassion are truly the three treasures I’ve learned to live by.

The lesson in patience came first for me as I was in the midst of raising four children. I asked for prayer from a wise woman, and she told me that when you pray for patience God gives you lots of opportunity to practice it. I was certainly getting lots of practice then, and did learn a great level of patience, but the learning didn’t stop with just that lesson. I found many other areas of my life that patience needed to be mastered, and I am still learning to this day.

I always had compassion for others. It’s a nice quality to have except when you’re always putting everyone else above yourself. The hardest area for me to work on was being compassionate toward myself. It required that I learn to love who I was, and I wasn’t able to do that until I saw myself through God’s eyes. As I became more loving and compassionate with myself, I found I was better able to serve others in a more compassionate way.

Simplicity came into play after years of trying to do everything the way I thought I was supposed to. It was actually in the midst studying the Bible over and again that the very word simplify began  popping off the pages. I would always ask the question at the end of my readings, “what is it that you’re trying to teach me today Lord?” Then I would write the answer that came to me in my journal. What I wrote was a dialogue between God and me, what he told me was that I was making things far more difficult than He had created life to be. As I let go of trying to find the answers I was looking for, I found simplicity by trusting in the process. The more I let go the freer I became, and with that freedom came the deepest of understandings in the simplest of ways.

Simplicity, patience and compassion are the ingredients that come from love, and there is nothing more important we can do in life than to do all things through love.