I can be so impatient with change.
Change in myself, and, to be honest, often change in others too.
I forget that things take a really long time. I had a thought on the way to school this morning that I should plant a tree in my backyard from a seedling and watch it grow. Every day, it would serve as a reminder that often change is slow, but it does happen… every day, one branch at a time. Even though it make take years, decades even to see great progress.
I am not actually going to plant a tree.
But I want to keep this analogy close today to remind me to trust in the slow work of God… to remind me that change does indeed happen in all of us at our own rates and times.
Here is my prayer for us this Friday morning:
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.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955)
What do you need to patience for today? Let us pray for that grace in all of us.
⠀
