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Prayers at the Beginning of School

Joyful Mystery #2: Visitation
Joyful Mystery #2: Visitation by James B. Janknegt

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

4 Comments

  1. Thanks for posting this, Kortney. It is germane to students of all ages and really compliments a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately. Howbeit, God in his merciful, longsuffering grace taught me long ago to place EVERYTHING in his divine hands and then to wait upon him in the assurance that he makes all things beautiful in his time.

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