Patient Trust

Recently, my friend Ian Cron (@icancron, on twitter) discovered the following which seems to speak directly to me these days -- hope it is also helpful to you.

Ian writes -- "On a separate note, I receive a daily devotional from Church of the Savior in Washington, DC. and I particularly enjoyed today’s. It comes from a letter the brilliant (albeit controversial) Jesuit Paleontologist Teillard de Chardin wrote to his young niece. Like my experience with Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, it reads like something that he wrote directly to me."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually–let them grow,
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.