4th Anniversary

Four years ago today, Irenic Thoughts went online. Several hundred thousand visits later, the blog is still rolling along. At that time King of Peace was finishing its fifth full year. Church attendance was about 100, or forty less a week than it is now. It was also news that King of Peace Episcopal Day School had reached full enrollment, where we have for years now had an embarrassingly long waiting list.

Of the 1,630 blog posts so far, the ones to generate the most heat and light are A loving response to abuse, which was one on domestic abuse from August 2007, and Going too far, the one on the fake drug arrest for youth group (gone bad, but not real bad).

The post that has meant the most to me has to be the one whose text I search from time to time to share with folks going through difficult times. It has spoken to me more than once and continues to speak to others:

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.

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 them 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.

—the Rev. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)