Slow work

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.

Your ideas mature gradually – let them grow, let them shape themselves, with 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 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 accepting the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

waiting for spring on Water St.