Hurry up Already...

Sometimes I wish God would hurry up. While I recognize my lacking tendency towards patience, and I know it is a virtue I should have, sometimes I just really wish God would work a little bit faster. Typically when I find myself in moments like this, wishing God would hurry up, it is because I am in an uncomfortable situation, a tense moment, a stretching moment, a moment without much resolution, and I yearn for resolution. I like things to be clear and calm and resolved. Sometimes I wish God would work faster for others, and not even necessarily for myself. When I see a friend suffering or a world that is full of injustice. When I see people asking questions which have no real answers, and people facing day after endless day of oppressive sameness, stuck in a situation they are powerless to change, I wish God would work a little bit faster.

I have been in Brazil for over two months now, and I have to say pretty much every day I have found myself in one of these moments, smack dab in the middle of tension, the unknown, uncertainty, questions without answers, two sides of the story, answers that encompass both/and, issues and insecurities that I know are far away from finding resolution, and various worlds colliding all at once. While some days I seem to deal with these tensions better than others, most days I find myself balancing on a high wire, trying to figure out how to catch my footing and make sure I don’t fall into the abyss. I don’t like feeling tense. I  get frustrated with myself that I can’t seem to move through these moments faster and I get frustrated that God seems much more content in these moments of tension than I am. Last week, however, I was introduced to a quote by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that (at least in a small way) allowed my heart to find a little bit of peace.

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God...Give God the benefit of believing that [God’s] hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. Above all, trust in the slow work of God.”

Accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. This is exactly how I have been feeling lately- stretched and anxious at my self as a “work in progress”. I want to have answers, have things figured out, and yet all God wants me to do is accept how it feels to be anxious in the meantime. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at the tension and paradox in my life. Alas, I am made in the image of a triune God, three in one. I worship a God who became human- fully human and fully divine- the true definition of paradox. Maybe this is why God is so much more comfortable in the tension of opposites. God's very identity is found in paradox, in tension. Maybe resolution is something we as humans crave but something God isn’t necessarily as concerned with. Maybe God enjoys the process, the journey and isn’t constantly looking for the end of the road, isn’t constantly thinking about what comes next. Maybe part of the regaining the image of God in each of us is learning to trust and live into the paradoxes within each of us, our already and not yet, the daily battle between our head and our heart, our response to the slow work of God, our daily choice to continue on in the struggle, always maintaining hope that God is in fact working in us and through us- perhaps most profoundly in the places of deep anxiety, confusion, incompleteness, perhaps most quickly in the moments that we feel the most stuck and stationary. Perhaps this is what it means to trust in the slow work of God and find peace within paradox. But sometimes, I will admit, I just wish God would hurry up...