An Answer to My Post on Waiting and Patience

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The other day, shortly after I wrote my post Waiting and Patience, I received a flyer from a retreat center that had the following poem in it: 

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 progress
      that it is made by passing through
      some states of instability —
      and that it may take a very long time. . . .

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
      that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
      in suspense and incomplete.

Copyright: The Institute of Jesuit Sources
Read the full poem here

Coincidence?  Maybe, but maybe not.  Two lines stick out for me:

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
and
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you . . .

My first reaction to these lines is “Yes,” and “I would like to,” respectively.  But it so easy to be the former and so hard to do the latter, even for someone like me in the “God Business”  (to use a disgusting phrase).  I was reminded of a hymn in the United Methodist Hymnal:

Not so in Haste My Heart

Not so in haste my heart!
Have faith in God, and wait;
Although He linger long,
He never comes too late.

He never cometh late;
He knoweth what is best;
Vex not thyself in vain;
Until He cometh, rest.

Until He cometh, rest,
Nor grudge the hours that roll;
The feet that wait for God
Are soonest at the goal.

Are soonest at the goal
That is not gained with speed;
Then hold thee still, my heart,
For I shall wait His lead.

And so I shall . . . or least I shall try.