1. Some will offer advice.
2. Some will judge you.
3. Some will think you’re a fool.
4. Few will…just listen and receive what you have to
say, where you’re at right now, how you feel, what you’re thinking. Few will “trust…the
slow work of God”—the work God is already doing and will do, if we will just
let God do God’s work and resist the urge to play God…and resist the urge to
rush what God wants to do.
Each respondent will mean well; however, how many will
really help one be well, I wonder? Few: those who listen and receive.
Anytime someone shares with you something from their
real self, they are sharing with you a precious gift. It is sacred, what they
have brought forth from their secret storehouse, the deepest treasure. It is accustomed to hiding in the shadows. When it comes into the light, it is timid and
easily frightened. It will be prone to go back into hiding, if we are not careful
and gentle with it. It is best met with silence, or, at the very least, gentle
words.
What is this I see before me? How is it that what God
sees as beautiful, the self sees as foolishness and mere exposure? Who is it
that feels foolish and exposed? Is it me? Could it be you, too? Who hasn’t felt
humiliated?
Will we now offer advice to the naked? Will we now
judge the humiliated? What will it take for us to just receive the gift of the
stripped self and trust that God holds them close?
……………………
I am learning what perseverance looks like. It is the
strength to carry on when you begin to doubt yourself. It is when a calling
grips you and won’t let you go. You have no choice but to carry on. You have no
choice but to trust God will provide everything needed for the journey, within
and without, in time. Perseverance is a work of trust.
Perseverance requires the openness to improvise. Never
does the journey of life take you the way you’ve pre-determined. Life deviates.
What you originally imagined will evolve into something you never dreamed. If
it is in God’s imagination it will be better than what you dreamed, though it
may be hard to see it that way at first.
To befriend what God imagines, you must be patient and
willing to take life one step at a time. You cannot hold onto what you have pre-determined.
You must relinquish what you thought was “the good life” because your “good
life” is different than God’s “best life.” God wants to give you his best life.
You cannot have it now, however. The best life is precisely a
one-step-at-a-time life. Why are you rushing what can’t be rushed? Why so eager
to arrive? Enjoy the journey. Be patient with God; be patient with yourself.
Do you have companions who believe in you on this
journey? Listen to them. Draw strength from them. They are to you as the voice
of God, because God is for you, never against you.
Pay no attention to the judgmental voices. They spring
from a doubting heart. They will give you lots of advice, pretending they know
better. They don’t know better. God knows you better and God is for you, never
against you.
Do you have companions who see God’s work in you?
Listen to them. Draw strength from them. Stay the course and be open to change,
but don’t look back. Leave regret where it belongs—in the past, with what-if.
The only voice that matters is the voice that goes with you and before you—God’s
voice, that voice you hear through the companions who believe God is working in
you and through you.
Amen.
………….
* The quote “trust in the slow work of God” is from a
meditation by Teilhard de Chardin
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