Above All Trust in the Slow Work of God

This poem has been much in my mind lately. My life is changing... Or no, it's that I am changing inside my life, so  much so that I wonder how the waters up on the surface can appear so placid. Much that seemed crucial now seems the opposite and vice versa.

Maybe change like this is happening in all of us all the time. I just know I haven't felt so much internal tumult since those three times that a new life was slowly stitching itself together inside my body.

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.We are quite naturally impatient in everythingto reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to somethingunknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progressthat it is made by passing throughsome 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 circumstancesacting on your own good will)will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spiritgradually forming within you will be.Give Our Lord the benefit of believingthat his hand is leading you,and accept the anxiety of feeling yourselfin suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ