Friday of the Fourth Week of Easter
I like to think I’m a fairly patient person, but that’s not always the case. Recently awaiting some medical test results, I found my patience waning. Today dealing with a computer problem I would not count patience as one of my virtues. I often lack patience with God in answering my heartfelt prayers. And I grow impatient with myself and the work God is doing within me. Maybe that’s at least partly why today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles spoke to me of the need for more patience.
We read of Paul preaching in the synagogue in Antioch (a continuation from yesterday’s passage) the “good news” that “what God promised our fathers he has brought to fulfillment for us, their children, by raising up Jesus….” In the previous verses, we hear Paul recount the history leading up to this fulfillment over hundreds of years, many generations, until John the Baptist heralded Jesus’ coming. This was not a quick fulfillment of God’s promises! And yet God did come through for them and for us.
I am reminded of a sort of prayer or exhortation written by the late French Jesuit priest and theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Here’s an excerpt (for the complete quote see Patient Trust at Ignatianspirituality.com):
“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….
….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.”
As we continue rejoicing in this Easter season, let us pray for more patience with God (and ourselves) as God is patient with us. Amen. Alleluia.
—Eileen Miller