Are you patient? How well do you cope with long grocery lines, crowded doctor’s offices, and traffic jams? And those are easy compared to some other kinds of waiting–the single person longing for a marriage partner, the childless couple who wants to start a family, the spouse trapped in an abusive marriage who desperately hopes things will get better, the employee in a dead end job.

It’s easy to get frustrated. Waiting is hard, especially when we think something should be done, yet God tells us time and again: “Be still in the presence of the Lord, and wait patiently for him to act” (Psalm 37:7).

We want a better life. We want security and peace of mind. We want to love and be loved. We want to believe that even our failures can work for good if we learn from them. Many of us want to become the person Jesus describes in the Sermon on the Mount, a person who loves his enemies, but when we look into our heart, we realize that not only do we not love our enemies, we don’t even love some of our family and friends.

The popular myths we believe are often the source of our failure. We’ve bought into ideas that initially looked reasonable, but ultimately were lies. Let’s consider one of the most destructive: the notion that we can bring about positive change in our life by our willpower.