Trust and Allow

Photo by D.M. Cobb

I get frustrated and despondent when spurts of creativity are followed by the Lull. A void that opens up inside me with inspiration a far-off and unreachable destination. Our dream for Wakkerstroom is also in this same boat, aimlessly adrift an unnaturally calm sea. We seem to make no progress, although weeks go by full of busyness and work orders keep pouring in after months of fiscal drought for George.

     It takes discernment to determine whether we ourselves are responsible for this unsettling stage. Should we go about it more aggressively? Market our dream more extensively? Get sponsorships? Prioritise? Leap?

     Most surely we can give attention to all of these, but not everything is within our power to take us to the next stage. For that we have to be willing to wait. To trust. And to watch for the first sign of the rising wind, so we can set sail.

In a time like this, it helps to read words like these:  

     
“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.”

                                                ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Matilda