Trusting in the Slow Work of God

Have you ever enjoyed waiting?

Me neither. I think to myself, “I don’t have time for this. I have stuff to do!” My internal clock seems perpetually set to “hurry.” But I’ve noticed in more recent years that God doesn’t have that setting. God’s setting is far slower, something called patient trust.

Lost Art

Patience is a lost art in the western world. We live in an on-demand culture. Fast food, same-day delivery, and instant access are bedrocks of 21st twenty-first-century life. Waiting for anything – a rideshare, a text to send, or a website to load – is a sign that something has gone wrong, something that needs to be fixed – quickly.

In a results-driven, time-starved world, practicing patient trust may be the one thing we hate the most – and at the same time, our single greatest need.   

The world is full of things we can’t make happen faster: friendships, winter, grief, a fine wine, love, and a little child telling a story. Embracing patient trust involves a willingness to let things develop on their own timeline instead of ours.

Different Process

As much as we may want to hurry things along or fix a situation right now, there is often a different process at work, a slower one.

In the middle of the last century, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote a letter to his niece who was quite anxious about her future. It has become something of a prayer. Perhaps it would be a helpful prayer for us:

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.

Something within us wants to have it all resolved, right now. But God doesn’t seem so rushed.

In the end, patient trust wins the day.

Adapted from Come Back: Returning to the Life You Were Made For, Roger Ross. Abingdon Press, 2020.

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