Accepting the Anxiety of Feeling in Suspense and Incomplete

I do not like to sit in the incompleteness of life unfinished. I do not like it when I am trying to reach a certain goal or center into a certain way of being, but become keenly aware of the gap between where my spirit is calling me versus where I currently am. It is uncomfortable to sit in the tension of the unfinished within me. Usually, I try to fix my life, and I get in my own way out of fear, distrust of God, and my own impatience with my own incompleteness. When I fix, I usually make matters worse.  

A friend recently sent me this prayer called Patient Trust from French mystic and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

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.

I love the last line of this prayer: “Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.” I am in the process of being in a career transition. My business recently closed, and I am struggling to find my next steps ahead. I am sitting in the incompleteness and anxiety between knowing what needs to happen and its final unfolding. I feel the tension sitting in my stomach like a low ache that is reminding me again and again that I have not, yet, stepped onto my path. Instead of trying to fix the situation, I am allowing the situation to be in suspense and incomplete while I reach for God’s hand to guide and carry me through this.

Too many times in my life, I have doubted God’s hand. I have tried to take matters into my own hands as I push to make what I want happen and become frustrated that I cannot move things forward at my timing. The deeper that I am getting to know God, the more I understand that God and my soul have their own timing and their own unfoldment of support. One of the many experiences I had running my own business was that I was always working. The pace of trying to keep up with competing commitments was exhausting me because my own spirit enjoys an easy pace that allows for time and connection to God. The longer I worked at my failing business, the more frustrated and exhausted I was because I was always pushing to get my work done on my timing and not God’s timing. I was fighting God’s unfolding of me and my life.

The honest answer is that I am not certain what I am doing next. I want to go back to teaching a few classes, healing people with my crystal bed, being a student, and writing, but this time around, I am finally accepting myself in suspense and incomplete. I am open to the unfoldment of whatever God is calling me to be. For once, I am open to the longings of my soul and not my own agenda. I wish I could say that X is who I am and Y is what I am doing with it. All I can say is that I am unfolding in God’s timing and not my own, and I am learning to accept the anxiety of feeling myself in suspense and incomplete.