Trying to trust in the slow work of God

I've been thinking I need to simplify my life. The first step would be selling 20 books to the used book store. Get rid of clothes I don't wear and that don't fit anymore. That sort of thing.

So I came across a book today called The Day Awaits: The Notre Dame Book of Prayers. It seemed like a prime candidate to be sold or given away to someone else. Notre Dame is, after all, the source of more bad memories than good ones.
But there's got to be a way to focus on the good. And maybe I'll change the bad memories. Memory is a funny thing anyhow. Eyewitnesses are unreliable.

But anyway, I was flipping through this prayer book, confirming my decision to take it down to the Well Fed Head when I saw the last prayer in the book. I read it and realized it could almost be a marathon training prayer. Thus I share it with you.

From Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are all, 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 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 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.