Friends,
Have you ever been to Stony Point Conference Center in Stony Point, NY? I’ve been here this week working with UKirk board members, leaders, and our Presbyterian Mission Agency Christian Formation Collective partners across the PC(USA). Among the five Collective Partner organizations, we care for, equip and support faith formation leaders who work with God’s beloved of every age and stage.
Yesterday, we had a conversation about working with Generation Z, and what the larger faith community can give them that will help encourage and support them as they journey from adolescence to young adulthood. Our answers? Our authentic, no bs, consistent presence, hope, and an invitation to help solve problems and serve people. (We can talk about that more at a future Monday conversation. (Don’t forget about the one this coming Monday at Noon Eastern on Navigating Un-Natural Disasters)
At the end of the conversation yesterday, I shared this favorite meditation from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (excerpted from Hearts on Fire) called 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.
Know we are praying for you as you trust the slow work of God within you and in your midst.
Blessings,
Gini