Trust in the Slow Work of God

I was recently approached by one of my facebook followers, who wanted to know which came first in my blog posts: the photo, or the words?  And though I truthfully replied that unless it's a quote I want to share, the photo almost always comes first, I really want to  say that yesterday's post was inspired by this poem by Teilhard de Chardin, which was shared in a letter from the Bishop of Maryland.

Trust in the slow work of God

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.

Yet it is the law of all progress, that it is made
by passing through some stages of instability,
and that 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.
Do not 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 you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in 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.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.

 My daughter, now 26, who is the little girl shown in yesterday's photo, has been struggling lately with a transition between jobs, and so I shared the poem with her.  Though she is not a person of faith, she expressed a deep appreciation for the thoughts in the poem, and so I found myself wanting to share the essence of these thoughts with a broader audience. 

The words, in this case, came to me during meditation, and when I went looking for a photo to illustrate them, this was the one that surfaced.  So I thought I would share that here, in case you're interested.