"What am I doing with my Life?" : Trusting the Slow Work of God
A young adult I know was sharing with me the other day a little about her search for a fulfilling job, which hasn't materialized yet. As we parted she said with some emotion, "I will be 30 in a few years, and I still don't know what I'm doing with my life!"
I don't know about you, but I recognised that sense of longing and frustration at seemingly not knowing one's place in the world, and my heart went out to her. For some reason many of us grow up expecting that our lives will be settled at a certain age... but in reality I wonder if that feeling of uncertainty about one's life direction ever conclusively goes away for anyone. In my own experience (being now on the other side of 30) it varies in intensity at different stages of life... the young adult years being a vulnerable time (and mid-life, I hear!). In any case, in this world where change is the only constant, perhaps it is also inevitable - and right - that we are continually invited to question our place in it.
These past few months since coming back to the Philippines have been a time of searching for me also as I have been learning more about the situation here and exploring ways to get involved and contribute what I can.
(Just an aside here: when I tell friends that I am looking for a suitable job, they are usually surprised. "Aren't you already a sister?" Actually, becoming a sister is like choosing a state of life, like getting married or being single. It doesn't come with a job description. Though it does affect your options somewhat. In practice any work I do will be something that my community agrees furthers our common mission. That rules out things like arms trading, for instance!)
It has been a promising and exciting time, but uncertainty is never easy. Which is why I was touched when someone wise told me recently: Our transformation into the person we are made by God to be is not so much about what we do but what we let happen to us. Like a seed that sprouts and puts forth roots and leaves, flowers and fruits, I don't make myself grow. The potential is already in me, and like the seed I let myself grow. It happens slowly, and I have to respect the sacredness of my inner process. This doesn't mean that I am a passive participant in my own growing, because I still have to choose to be affected by what happens to me; to allow it to change me. The dispositions I need then are humility, trust and surrender to the process of life.
Being aware of this makes me less anxious about the future, knowing it is not something I need to worry and plan into existence, but something that will rise to meet me, and I need only have the courage and confidence in divine generosity to say "yes". To trust that, when I get to where the horizon closes down now, I will see yet another path opening up ahead, full of its own surprising graces.
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.
Comments
Post a Comment