My Dear Shepherds,

In a season long ago, when I was deeply worried about a loved one’s future, a friend sent me this by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

That counsel comes back to me from time to time, like a whisper from behind a door, “Psst. This is the slow work of God.” It is also a timely word now, at the turning of the year.

It’s especially fitting for pastors. Slow work is not our cup of tea. We do all we can to structure and streamline discipleship, worship, and evangelism. Efficiency matters. Time’s a wastin’. But God requires us to work with inefficient imperatives. Mustard seeds. Little children. The least and the last. Time isn’t actually a wastin’. We aren’t called to manufacturing or sales. We’re shepherds and wheat farmers. We’re employed in the slow work of God.

Near the end of each year, I was expected to write an Annual Report. I’d recap my sermon series, the initiatives we’d pursued, a census of congregational goings and comings, and our milestones. The problem, of course, was that such things don’t measure the slow work of God very well.

Who can say what came of our weeks of persistent prayer, an incidental hallway conversation, or the investment in a needy kid’s life. Someone wrote me recently about the significance of one sermon I preached from Hosea 1–3 in 1989. It was still working!

Occasionally I look at the weekly photos posted on Facebook from the church Susan and I served for 14 years in western Pennsylvania. We’ve been gone nearly 30 years, and I almost never recognize anyone in the pictures. Most of them wouldn’t know my name either. But I am encouraged to know that, by God’s grace, I had a hand in his slow, deliberate, everlasting work among them.

Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) wrote these words in 1915 as a young soldier in a letter to his cousin from the WWI front. They’re part of a kind of prayer poem. He wasn’t actually writing to her about God’s slow work around us but within us.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete. Above all, trust in the slow work of God, our loving vine-dresser.

I’m familiar with “the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete,” but I’m more likely to attribute it to my angsty personality or overwork than the guidance of God. Those familiar feelings aren’t failures of faith. They’re the press of God’s fingers in our clay.

While it is difficult to monitor the slow work of God around us, it may be even harder to recognize his slow work within us. We are divine works in progress, assigned to holy work even though God isn’t finished with us yet. What is necessary is not merely that we wait patiently but that in our waiting, we trust God to do what only God himself can do, and that he’ll do something miraculously in and through us worthy of his great and gracious name.

Teilhard de Chardin ended his meditation like he began, “Above all, trust the slow work of God,” adding, “our loving vine-dresser.” God’s slowness—his patience and deliberateness in our lives—is that of a gardener. We aren’t topiary, trimmed into some unnatural shape. We’re pruned so that we might miraculously bear divine fruit, fruit that will endure forever! The people we serve taste Jesus in us. They grow to be like him because we persevere in God’s slow work.

Be ye glad!

Lee Eclov recently retired after 40 years of local pastoral ministry and now focuses on ministry among pastors. He writes a weekly devotional for preachers on Preaching Today.