Impatient-pants

Came across a great poem this week that pretty much sums up my life/attitude right now:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would 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 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.

-Fr. Teilhard de Chardin-

I am in an in-between stage of life right now- I am so HAPPY and grateful about where God is leading me and the grace that He has given to allow me to pursue the path I believe he intended for me all along.  But I feel like I only understand one piece of that path- one tiny part of that plan- and I struggle to be at peace with the rest of it- the parts unknown and frankly, scary.  

I am impatient with myself as I find myself slipping into thinking about the past and about things and people that God has made clear are not for me. I hear people talk about praying for a desire to be gone and the Lord miraculously removing it from their thoughts and their hearts. 

I wish that was my story.

It is not though. My story is one of slow change and slow learning. It takes my heart a long time to process things, a long time for God to work sinful desires out of me, and a long time to really see what God accomplished through trials. I am quick to jump to conclusions about why God is doing this or that in my own and other people's lives, and I am learning (very slowly, of course, ha!) to slow down and let GOD do the work and be the one to reveal what He is doing.

Teaching high school taught me a lot about having patience with others- what I've realized lately is that I still have much to learn about being patient with my own heart and the work that God is doing in it. I pray, like the author of the poem above, that we would all give the Lord the benefit of believing that His hand is leading us in a way that is more perfect in timing, in process, and in end result than we could ever conceive ourselves.

"Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! 

Amen." 

Ephesians 3:20-21