By Tina Teng-Henson

Prayer of Teilhard de Chardin

Patient Trust

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
excerpted from Hearts on Fire

This famous prayer has spoken to me over many years about the need to value patient process over personal agenda.  Ignatian “holy indifference” means that the outcome I personally consider optimal may not be – and I must surrender to the sovereign will of God.  This has not been in my nature, but it has slowly become my way of being as I’ve entered my forties and released the drivenness of my thirties.  Self-control is one fruit of the Holy Spirit that is required to lean in this direction. 

I’m not pastoring now, but I’m ministering to people everywhere I go.  Particularly at my children’s school, where parents volunteer weekly in the classrooms and we chaperone field trips each month – I find myself stumbling into some of the deepest conversations with other parents. Sometimes I listen as they share about getting divorced.  “I have no idea where this conversation is going,” one blurted aloud to me the week before Christmas break. I offer to pray with him, and he readily agrees. I wonder what God is trying to do in his life.  These are holy moments of encounter, and I pray for the wisdom and heart-capacity to love these acquaintances well, as friendship develops between us.  It takes self-control to not jump ahead to “should I get an MFT degree?” when people who have known me as a pastor or as a friend say that they really see me as a counselor at the core of my being.  I would love to receive that training someday.  I’m just not sure the time is now.  

I drive from place to place several days of the week, as a hospice chaplain.  I have patients up and down the southern part of the Bay Area of northern California.  I tell people this work is profound and poignant, tender and funny.  My patients surprise me with their empathy and compassion, despite many of them having Alzheimer’s or dementia.  Sometimes they pray for me, right after I pray for them! But I find myself loving them, looking forward to visiting them, stepping into their homes or rooms, stepping into their lives.  They bless me, and they teach me a lot.  It takes self-control to not share too much about my life; I want to keep the focus on them. But what a gift that what could be impersonal and rote has become so meaningful. As I know and encounter them, I want to be known as well. 

I exercise a lot of self-control at home.  My 3 children are now 6, 9 and 11, and they keep me on my toes! I do lots of house cleaning, cooking and tidying up.  I often forget what I used to do for fun. Read a novel straight through? Of course I’d rather do what I want to do (read, pray, create art, play volleyball multiple nights a week) but their existence calls for sacrifice and forbearance.  So I do what I can to stay healthy so I can keep up with them.  I pray however I can, whenever I can.  “Lord God, take and receive all my liberty…” as it says in that famous prayer by St. Ignatius:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,
my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will,
All I have and call my own.

You have given all to me.
To you, Lord, I return it.

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and your grace,
that is enough for me.

I meet with several directees for spiritual direction each month.  I need to pray more for these friends, but each month I give them a precious hour of the best listening I have learned to offer.  I listen for how the Lord is showing up in their lives.  Sometimes I need to set aside my preconceptions to really attune to what they’re actually saying.  

• Ohh, this is actually a confession of sin, of one’s work-agenda reigning over the Lord’s way of working.  
• THIS is a very sad sharing about the loneliness of being single.  
• Oooh, this is very good news.  Someone is trying to live sanely, within limits and boundaries, and trusting God for the resulting financial outcomes. 

I listen, and I pray, and I seek to understand.  We open with silence. We close with prayer.  

I keep on saying to people that I’ll hold them in my heart, but the truth is, I can’t do that, really. I can’t hold them in my heart, because then I get really burdened and weighed down. What I need to do is lift them up to the Lord. Some of the things that people share with me are so painful and so sad, I cannot carry them around with me as I go about other business.  I must lift them up to the Lord to care for them.  Only He can address their deepest wounding, their very real hurts, their hardship, their pain.  Sometimes it weighs me down, and I take a nap to rest from trying to carry them.  I wake up better able to continue forward.  

There is so much mystery, beauty and grace in my life right now.  I have a thousand thanksgivings to God for the church we are a part of, where I am so excited to simply be a member.  I’ve not been at a church like this ever before.  My heart feels so full and so happy.  I’ve learned to say no, to say I wish I could, but maybe somebody else can.  I’m learning to pay attention to what reactions within me register – subtly, almost imperceptibly.  I’m listening to my own heart.  “Maybe that would be too much.  Maybe that would stretch me too thin.”  All this practice listening to others is helping me listen a bit better to my own soul’s voice.  

Gentle reader, how is it with your soul?  How do you want to exercise self-control? Don’t give your everything to everyone.  Leave some good things for yourself.  You must.  You matter.  May your soul be blessed as you enter this new year.  May the sweetness of the Lord’s care rest upon your heart. May he be gracious to you, turn his face towards you, and give you peace. 

Tina Teng-Henson serves as a spiritual director and hospice chaplain. As a wife and mother of three, she occasionally guest-preaches and teaches. When she’s not volunteering at her children’s schools, she plays volleyball, reads, and writes.