I love this photo from a walk last week near my home. I continue to think of my town as “where urban meets rural.” This time of year there are newborns from the rural side of things. In this photo in particular, it was fun to see what already is a miniature horse with newborn mini miniature horse. It threw my brain a bit to see the tiniest — the bigger horses are also in my neighborhood, a little further down the street. I also loved seeing the bond that is mother / young.
A friend and I are in some rather significant individual discernment these days. He in his, that regardless of choice, will shape much of the next years of his life. Me in mine, that, also, will shape much of the next years of my life. It often seems that the external is what it is all about — the job, what to do in the job, the move, how to make the move happen. Those things matter. And, I generally find that the external points to a significant internal. The “things” on the outside point to the “values” on the inside. To churn on the values, to experience external life that invokes inner awareness — that’s good stuff there.
After a call last night, seeking to bring internal to even the smallest layer of communal witnessing, same friend sent me the poem below by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the early 1900s French Philosopher and Jesuit Priest. I share it here, because sometimes I forget the scale that is the slow work — whether that be of divine, or inner. I need reminder of patient trust, not so much for all things to work out as I would like them, but rather, to remember that there is more happening at different scales that cultivate a trust, even of the new coming.
Enjoy.
Patient Trust
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.