Becoming

If you had told me a year ago that I would still be at home seven months after I graduated from college, I would have cried. Well, here I am. And a few days ago when I received the reality check, I admit that the tears came.

I feel as if I am still no closer to figuring out what to do with my life than I was seven months ago, but I know--deep down somewhere--that I am. Though the process is slow and at times painful, I am becoming someone. I am trying to hold onto the good and weed out the bad and the ugly. But the bad and the ugly are not going without putting up a fight. With the grace of God I conquer one obstacle, then find myself faced with another even uglier. A constant battle.

It reminds me of a quote (I think it's a collection of quotes, but they read as one) that a dear friend of mine slipped to me a few years ago when my heart was in turmoil. I think about this quote often when I realize that I have been getting ahead of myself, when I find myself drowning in my weaknesses and failures.

"We are impatient of being on the way to something

And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made

by passing through some stages of instability--

and that may take a very long time...

Ideas mature gradually. Don't try to force them on, as though you could be today what time 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 surely through the obscurity and the...BECOMING and accept yourself in suspense and incomplete...

Since your activity has to be far-reaching, it must emanate from a heart that has suffered....

We must offer our existence to God, who neither wastes nor spoils, but rather makes use--BETTER than we can ever anticipate--of the struggle in which we are enveloped."

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin