Melinda Schmidt joins me this week on the podcast to talk about waiting. We’ve been in a difficult year that has been all about waiting. We haven’t done it particularly well as a country or in our churches. As we enter the season of Advent, the very theme of waiting is front and center. I hope you will consider with us how you have been waiting and how we might wait together in this season.

We mentioned and recommend The Critical Journey by Janet O. Hagberg and Robert A. Guelich.

Also mentioned and read is the poem Patient Trust by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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

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