Trusting God At All Times

I recently came across these fine words from the poem, Patient Trust, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  These are the first two verses:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everythingto reach the end without delay.We should like to skip the intermediate stages.We are impatient of being on the way to somethingUnknown, something new.And yet it is the law of all progressthat it is made by passing throughsome stages of instability -and that may take a very long time.

While I keep hoping that the pace of life will slow just a bit my time continues to be filled with a full share and more of ministry opportunities.  In addition, when I think about the process of church transformation, or any kind of transformation for that matter, there are definitely “some stages of instability.”  I understand instability, in this case, to mean those times when we are not sure what God is doing, but still believe God to be working.  And, while we believe God to be working, sometimes it’s surely hard to see it!  Hopefully, whether we find ourselves in personal, church, job or family related transition, it will not take a “very long time.”   In the middle of it, however, it may not take long to feel “very long.”

Trusting God at all times, as the psalmist reminds us, rightly includes the periods of being in the middle, in the intermediate and in times of instability.  May God bless our days with the ability to savor “the intermediate stages” filling them with worship, prayer, meditation on scripture and in simply taking a deep breath.  Let us not miss the journey for being impatient to get to the destination.  May our “trust in the slow work of God” only deepen as we experience and share in the ministry of Jesus Christ.  

In Christ,

Anne Clifton H

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