If you are joining as part of our October Spiritual Journey cohort, please add your link below (scroll to the end).
If you are a Poetry Friday visitor, please enjoy this reflection (and the linked reflections of our cohort).
Margaret at Reflections on the Teche has the Poetry Friday round up this weekend. Join us!
For our October Spiritual Journey reflections:
Where, how are you trusting – or struggling to trust — in the slow work of God?
Patient Trust
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
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—
“We are… impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.”
Most of my life I have not been a great example of trusting in the slow work of God.
As a young girl, I watched my older sister do just about everything a year ahead of me: cross the street by herself; first sleepover; wear pantyhose – and mascara! I wanted what was just out of reach and I wanted it right then.
As a young woman, I was impatient to find my purpose…constantly changing majors in college; toiling at jobs I didn’t love. When babies arrived, I imagined their school years, their summer experiences, always looking past the intermediate stages of instability.
Somewhere in my fifties, I realized that instability is another word for life’s constant unfolding. I am always a work in progress. “Now” became my goal. To be fully present.
The past two years I have lived this in technicolor. Eight weddings, each a joy. My sisters and I waded fully into caregiving for our aging parents. We rode the waves of their decline, feeling every heartache of anticipatory grief that crashed around us.
I am a planner. I’m uber-organized, always in command of a Plan A (and B and C…). Until I’m not. Losing my parents within a year of each other, losing an unborn grandbaby, navigating a move from our home of 35 years, watching my sisters begin moves that will take us further away from one another… At some point, I realized I have to stop fighting the current.
Today I try not to imagine much past the coming few weeks. It’s a way to let grace in, to “accept the anxiety of feeling [myself] in suspense and incomplete.”
These days, this is the best prayer I can live.
Link your October Spiritual Journey Reflections here:
Patricia Franz writes picture books and poetry. She believes children, dogs, and sourdough have a lot to teach us about life, joy, and wonder. She has raised two boys, four dogs, and holds a master’s degree in Theology with a focus on children’s spirituality. Patricia, her husband, her Bernese Mountain dog, Bonny, and her sourdough starter split their time between the Arizona desert and the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Patricia, Navigating the losses that come is such a hard part of life’s journey. We have to trust in the hand of God to be held through it all. Thanks for sharing your spiritual journey and for gathering us this month.
Hi Patricia: The older I get, the more I try to plan and get control. To be “ready.” It gets exhausting. I hope I can learn the lesson you wrote about above. Thanks so much for hosting and this prompt. It will need revisiting.