The Slow Work of God

I recently came across this quote from Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and priest, writing back in the early twentieth century. His gentle exhortation continues to speak a much needed word to us some hundred years later. I guess immediate gratification has always been an addiction for us humans, but it clearly is becoming one we are able to feed with more ease and consistency.

While Teilhard seems to speaking of the slow work of God in the individual, I think his words can equally express the slow work of God shaping and guiding a community, a people, a church. People are the ultimate speed bump. The more you add the slower things get. But in the economy of grace, we have been given all the time in the world to become what God intends us to be, both individually and communally.

As we enter into the season of Lent, may we delve deeper into the super-abundant grace of our God to receive that which makes possible the kind of patient trust Teilhard so beautifully describes:

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 to force them on,