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.

As much as these days of transition are unsettling and perhaps confusing, Teilhard wants me to know that this dis-ease itself is an act of “grace” in my life. 

Jesus spoke about God’s work in life as “seed”: 

‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head.

(Mark 4:26-28)

This simple parable encourages me to trust the process of life. I do not need to “force” the seed to do its work. There is a power at work (“grace”) that uses the “circumstances” of my life to shape in me all that I need to be. 

When I try to “force” the processes of life, I inhibit the work of “grace.” I need the friction and suffering of this in-between time to develop the strength and quality that will help me get to the other shore and then move on into the next transition I will face.  

My strident efforts to make life work, presume that I know what is supposed to happen, how the story of my life is intended to play out. So often I have seen people who felt their lives needed to go one way and struggled to wrestle their circumstances to conform to their determination of the way things should be. But what they needed lay in a different direction, to which eventually they came around. 

By trying to “force” the circumstances of my life into the frame I have determined they should fit, I only create more pain and delay the gift that “grace” has for me in the circumstances of my life as they are unfolding.

Lord, help me to trust the circumstances of life as they are and to open to the flow of grace that is your presence always with me.