Continue in Patience

If you have not read Elder Uchtdorf's priesthood session talk, I highly recommend you do, especially if you really want something and it isn't coming. Here are just a few parts that I loved and really stuck out to me.

"Patience-the ability to put our desires on hold for a time-is a precious and rare virtue.  We want what we want, and we want it now.  Therefore, the very idea of patience may seem unpleasant and, at times, bitter.  Nevertheless, without patience, we cannot please God; we cannot become perfect.  Indeed, patience is a purifying process that refines understanding, deepens happiness, focuses action, and offers hope for peace."

"There is an important concept here: patience is not passive resignation, nor is it failing to act because of our fears.  Patience means active waiting and enduring.  It means staying with something and doing all that we can-working, hoping, and exercising faith; bearing hardship with fortitude, even when the desires of our hearts are delaying.  Patience is not simply enduring; it is enduring well!"

"Every on of us is called to wait in our own way.  We wait for answers to prayers.  We wait for things which at the time may appear so right and so good to us that we can't possibly imagine why Heavenly Father would delay the answer...God's promises are not always fulfilled as quickly as or in the way we might hope; they come according to His timing and in His ways...Looking back, I know for sure that the promises of the Lord, if perhaps not always swift, are always certain."

"We must learn that in the Lord's plan, our understanding comes 'line upon line, precept upon precept.' In short, knowledge and understanding come at the price of patience.  Often the deep valleys of our present will be understood only by looking back on them from the mountains of our future experience.  Often we can't see the Lord's hand in our lives until long after trials have passed.  Often the most difficult times of our lives are essential building blocks that form the foundation of our character and pave the way to future opportunity, understanding, and happiness."

"Patience means accepting that which cannot be changed and facing it with courage, grace, and faith.  Patience is a process of perfection.  The Savior Himself said that in your patience you possess your souls.  Or, to use another translation of the Greek text, in your patience you win mastery of your souls.  Patience means to abide in faith, knowing that sometimes it is in the waiting rather than in the receiving that we grow the most.  This was true in the time of the Savior.  It is true in our time as well, for we are commanded in these latter days to 'continue in patience until ye are perfected.'"