Did you ever come across something in your youth that stuck with you? Something that you knew would mean something down the road? A piece of advice from a wise grandparent or teacher? A song that spoke to your heart or a verse from the Scriptures that you latched onto? Something significant, a game-changer really.

That something for me was the ‘Patient Trust’ prayer.

Had I not first uttered this prayer so many years ago, sometime between my high school and college years, I am not sure I would have endured ‘the waiting’ thrown at me in life in the same way.

To this day I am not sure if I found this prayer, or if this prayer found me. I’ve clutched onto the words of ‘Patient Trust’ through the years of trying to determine what God wanted me to do in my college studies and my occupational therapy career, to waiting to meet my future husband, to the present time of the long and often painful waiting that is called infertility.

I am not good at waiting. I hate waiting! Whether in big or small things, I am terrible at waiting. And I know I am not alone. We are all waiting for something, or for someone, or for some answer. We are waiting for the weekend to come, waiting for the season to change, or waiting to discern where God is leading us.

I love the ‘Patient Trust’ prayer because it reads like a poem and acknowledges the real sense of longing that is within every soul.

This prayer has guided me throughout life and yet I know in my human weakness, I fall so short of what it hopes to attain — patient trust. God knew I needed this treasure of a prayer when it first landed in my lap and I find myself coming back to it with the same intrigue as it first sparked in me two decades ago.

I hope this prayer strengthens you too and grants all of us the graces to grow slowly, but surely, in patient trust.

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