Slow Work

These wonderful masons are working hard every day in the freezing cold weather....so I feel guilty complaining...but Friends, this project was suppose to be finished three months ago and I want to hang a Christmas wreath on my front door.

  Clearly, after living on planet Earth for half a century, raising four kids, and surviving a year long battle with the big C,  I still have not learned patience. I want this construction project over, I want to figure out this new chapter of my life faster, and I want to be at my "safe five years clean" now.  

I had a great prayer taped to my mirror during treatment.  I think I need a review:

Patient Trust

by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ

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.

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