Revelation 22:17b
Let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.
While the location and focus each year changes, the atmosphere, and my core support to who I am as a Church Educator is fed, sustained, and nurtured by the opportunity to be a part of the Association of Partners in Christian Education (APCE)’s Annual Event. In this time away for continuing education I am gifted with participation in worship, engaging speakers and workshops and fellowship with long-time friends and new educators. This past year, we gathered in St. Louis MO, and I allowed my heart to sing as I learned new music, explored the latest in Christian Education theory and resources and crucially, begin hearing how the church and church leaders can begin to reconnect and reengage young families in this next phase of church life. I always leave APCE’s Annual Event exhausted, but heart filled as I know God is continuing to guide myself and the larger church into the new horizons faithfully and hopefully. And so, this devotion will close with a prayer that spoke to me in that time from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Patient Trust.
Prayer
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
