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This month I’d like to share with you a poem that I've been cherishing for the past three or so years.  It is called Patient Trust by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

 

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.

………

I love the promises embedded in this poem -  We are almost always on the way to something new. God is at work and we can trust that.  There is a new spirit gradually being formed in us.

In this pandemic time, it’s easy to feel the anxiety of the incompleteness; the suspense. But throughout all the tumult of this season, I am certain that God is forming a new spirit in our congregation. Join me in noticing it.  What is God gradually forming here? What is God gradually forming in you?

Peace,

Pastor Bekki