Good morning…
A quirky comment lingers from a conversation this week. I don’t remember where I was, why it was said, or who spoke this odd truth.
“You know, the invention of the elevator created the penthouse,” she said. “Before then, the top floor was despised because of all the exhausting steps.”
What meaning does this statement give me at a time when I am waiting, waiting for my husband to return home from his travels, waiting to become a grandparent in the next few weeks, waiting to see how my parents’ aging process evolves over time, waiting to admire the loves that grow in our children’s lives, waiting until retirement somehow, some way, some day seems right. In my middle-of-the-night mind, I am taking the exhausting steps of trudging to a higher point of view without the quick benefit of an elevator.
God’s invention of what-is-next will eventually come, and, when the moment is right, I will bask in the panoramic view of the penthouse.
One of my favorite writings joins my thoughts.
******
Patient Trust by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ
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.
******
I thought long and hard about all this and saw that God controls the actions of wise and righteous people, even their love and their hate. No one knows anything about what lies ahead (Ecclesiastes 9:1, GNT).
Without an elevator in sight, I sense myself walking up the stairwell of my life. I am trying to accept the anxiety of being on the way to something unknown and new, in suspense and incomplete.
Lord, please give me the the benefit of believing that your hand is leading me.
…Sue…
