On New Year's Day

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, SJ