Romero and de Chardin

Two quotations:

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 says, grace and circumstances acting on your good will) will make them 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

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.  Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us . . .

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.  This enables us to do something , and to do it very well.  It may be incomplete, but it is an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.  We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between ‘master’ builder and the worker.  We are the workers, not the master builder; the ministers, not the messiah.  We are prophets of a future that is not our own.

Archbishop Oscar Romero