It seems there’s no end in sight! The last few weeks, there have been road closures and diversions all over the place.

One afternoon, my other half parked at Tesco and walked into town, cunningly avoiding the four-way traffic lights at the crossroads. However, when he got back to his car, there was total gridlock at the roundabout! He eventually escaped about 30 minutes later.

Another day, we found ourselves in quite a long queue for injections outside the surgery. When we finally got inside and within sight of a nurse, things ground to a halt again, thanks to an IT problem.

There’s nothing like a long wait to try our patience! Then again, seething about the wait won’t help and it will almost certainly make us feel a whole lot worse. Impatience lowers our mood, raises our blood pressure and can cause all sorts of trouble.

I say this as someone who has never found patience easy. But patience really matters.

The Bible often says God is ‘patient and kind’. I think it’s telling that patience is twinned with kindness. If we think about it, we’ll probably all agree that being patient will not only help us to be kind to others in the queue, but kind to ourselves as well.

So the next time we find ourselves having to wait, perhaps we could pause, take a deep breath and choose to be patient. We could even pray for patience. Try it: it really does work.