The Slow Work takes it’s name from the poem below. Originally, The Slow Work was the place for Nathan’s Spiritual Direction practice. Following on the Jesus Way is a journey that indeed requires patient trust. But as the invitation to Yorkshire came, The Slow Work seemed like the perfect name for our ministry. Our work with vulnerable adults is slow work, being present in the small things of daily life to point those in our care to Jesus. And the work of disciple making in post-Christian England is slow work. Trust must be earned, and that trust will come slowly. So above all, we trust in God’s slow work and delight in our small role in it.
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
excerpted from Hearts on Fire