027 | Trust in the Slow Work of God

I’ve been thinking lately about the ways God has been working in and through my life over the past few years—through the joys and the sorrows—to bring me to this place where I am actively moving toward a new season in my life and ministry. Even when my work Incarnation Lutheran Church is done, it is only a page turn and not the end of the story. There will be more to be observed, discovered, experienced, created.⁣ ⁣

I love this passage that my colleague Kai Nilsen shared as part of his sermon last Sunday when the theme was Hope is Patient. I love that de Chardin was not only a Jesuit priest but a paleontologist, which must shape his perspective on how we are shaped and change over time. We spent time with it as a staff yesterday and I’m finding that, each time I read it, the layers unfold and new phrases speak meaning.⁣ ⁣

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 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) ⁣ ⁣

The practice of cultivating sanctuary involves attentiveness to both the daily and how things move and shift over a longer arc of time. ⁣ ⁣

What speaks to you from this passage today?⁣

As Kai asked us: What comforts you? What challenges you?⁣