July 26, 2026

Trust The Slow Work

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.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist whose theological writings, including The Divine Milieu, were suppressed by the Catholic Church during his lifetime and only published after his death in 1955. This passage captures the tension he lived daily: a scientist who saw evolution as God's patient method, and a believer forced to wait decades before his own ideas would be heard. He insisted that the instability of the unfinished middle—the hard, unresolved stretch of any real change—was not wasted time but the very shape growth takes. His life of enforced waiting makes this a fitting word for anyone in the slow, uncertain middle of their own transformation.