At times, God speaks to us through people, from both the secular and spiritual, to answer our questions and wonderings. One such event happened for me on a retreat, when I was feeling my way for the next steps in life. Away from the distractions of home, near the end of the retreat, and at the peak of the silence and stillness, someone sent me this Patient Trust reflection. I immediately knew it was for me. Sometimes the answer is to wait with patience, suspended and incomplete. From the Lord, it was and still is enough for me.

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 and 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 yourself being in suspense and incomplete.

(Pierre Teihard de Chardin, S.J.)