The Slow Work of God

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit, knew a lot about patience and how long things take. He was a palaeontologist, used to thinking in terms of vast expanses of time. This reminds me that our sense of having been failed by God, or ourselves, is often simple impatience. We don't give things enough time. I'm always trying things for a little while and then chucking them aside because they haven't "worked." But an essential aspect of faith, Teilhard reminds us, is trusting that God is at work even when, from our time-limited perspective, we can't see it.

TRUST IN THE SLOW WORK OF GOD

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are, quite naturally, impatient in everything
to reach the end.
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 stage 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 your own good will)
will make them 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.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin