“This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” (Ps 118:24)

Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends! And Happy Wonderful-Day-to-Give-Thanks-Anyway to the rest of you!

There are so many things I’m grateful for today:

• you who faithfully show up here and read my words. Your presence is a gift.
• hugs and phone calls
• the sound of rain on the leaves. . . and a dry home
• the many books lining my shelves. So much to explore!
• a comfy chair, my fuzzy red blanket, and a blue pottery mug of lemon-ginger tea
• an early-morning bike ride along a route with trees changing from their green summer dress to crimson and gold.

But amidst all of these more concrete gifts, today I’m especially savoring and celebrating God’s faithfulness and sometimes hidden creativity as, in the words of Malcolm Guite, God continues to “replenish, renovate [us] and sustain his long, slow blessings in [our] growing soul[s].”

We know that leaves follow roots, spring arrives in winter’s wake, and birth can’t happen before conception. And yet those long seasons of waiting can feel hard.

• We pray, and instead of wars ceasing, another country is invaded.
• A book takes twelve years of stop-and-start often difficult labor to write.
• We wait and pray for 1828 days for a new lead pastor, wait 1263 days and counting to get back into our own church building. (Thanks for the numbers, Justin!)

We wait and wonder and pray. And then one day God pulls the curtain back and we get to glimpse what he has been doing in and around us during that long wait: faith grown, details arranged, love and joy deepened. In the silence and the waiting, God has been at work.

Recently, our congregation has had the honor of seeing how God has, over decades, grown Drew, our new Lead Pastor, from a career path leading towards academia into a deepening love of pastoring. We’ve heard how a couple of years ago God called his wife to a position here in Vancouver, so their family already had a home in our city. And how, long before our official search process began, a member of our congregation “happened” to meet him and mentioned that we were looking for a new pastor. At the time, Drew dismissed the opportunity. But God was still at work.

We’ve heard how their children settled more easily into our community than anywhere else they’ve been. And we’ve experienced how God, in His profound kindness and gentleness, knowing that after a previous difficult experience we might struggle to trust again, allowed Drew to serve as our interim preacher since last Advent. We didn’t have to vote without getting to know him and hear him preach over many months. While God was preparing Drew and arranging details in his family’s life, He was also working in us, healing us, deepening our dependence on Him, reviving our ability to trust again, and bringing us to a place of unity so that the vote to call Drew was over 96% positive. Only God could have orchestrated all the details with such exquisite tenderness and grace.

I see God’s long, slow work in my own life, too, as I reread this post that I wrote eleven years ago while trying to rustle up the nerve to send the first few bits of what would become my first book to a mentor. I needed every one of those “Ten Reasons You Can Dare to Put Your Heart Out There” to overcome the fear that I felt as I exposed pieces of my vulnerable heart to her.

Several years later, I put a printed copy of that same blog post in the front of my binder as I headed to the first day of my spiritual direction training program.

Fastforward (or slow forward) again, and some of those same truths are coming back to me as I prepare to share about Risking Rest on 100 Huntley Street—an opportunity I did not seek but for which I am deeply grateful. I marvel that God has grown me from someone terrified to share even tidbits of my writing with a single person into someone who, with friends praying, is able to actually (mostly 🙂 ) look forward with excitement and a deep sense of God at work to the chance to use my “out loud” voice on TV. I never dreamed it was possible. But God has been at work. He is (thank God!) still at work.

Even though His work in and around us may sometimes feel slow and hidden, we can be confident with Paul that “He who began a good work in you will be faithful to complete it in you” (Phil 1:6).

As we give God thanks, let’s remember the wonderfully reassuring, if also challenging, words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ:

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.

____________________

P.S. If you’re the kind of person who likes to listen to podcasts, you might enjoy this recent episode of the Living From the Heart podcast. In this deeply personal conversation, I spoke with Rod Janz about limitations, gentleness, and the journey towards resting more deeply in God’s tender love.

And yes, I’ll let you know when the 100 Huntley Street interview airs.