DAVE EBENHOH

I will get enough sleep! I will exercise more! I will pray more! I will chase my passion! I will live my dream!

We seem to have the power to change the way we think in the shortest of moments: a new idea opens our mind, powerful words open our heart, a photograph opens our eyes, a stranger opens our life, or a new vision energizes our company, and we step into a whole new world within our own minds.

Then, a day or a week or a month or a year or a decade later, we wonder what happened to that great new way of living that now seems just a dream - a whisper of what might have been or what should have been.

And, this, is when the real work and the real change begins.

The great gift and power of the mind that allows our thinking to be utterly transformed in an instant must be integrated with the knowledge that we can only move forward from where we are standing right now. What is the one next step that I can take? Where will I find the courage and commitment to make the intentional and consistent change in my daily behavior and reactions? How will I live into the future that I now know is possible?

We need both: the great vision and the small steps. Transformed thinking without the concrete and incremental steps does not get us anywhere, and incremental behavioral changes without a deeper vision may lead us to places just as confused and lost as where we already find ourselves.

What is your great vision?
What is your next step?

O Spirit, help us to trust in your slow work within us.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We would 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 us
our ideas mature gradually - help us to
let them grow, let them shape themselves,
without undue haste.
Help us try not to force ourselves forward,
as though we could be today
what time, grace and circumstances,
acting with our own good will
will make of us tomorrow.

Only you could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within us will be.
We trust and believe that your hand is leading us -
help us to accept the anxiety of feeling
in suspense and incomplete.

Amen.

adapted from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ

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