Patient Trust

I’ve been in Peru for a month now. I had thought that by this point I’d be feeling fairly immersed in the community here, but so far it’s been a slower start than I expected. The school year ended the first week of December, which also means that the parish is running fewer programs than usual. I was supposed to go stay with a host family for two weeks, but my host mom ended up getting sick, so I stayed at home during that time instead. Everyone was off for the Christmas holidays, and now Erin and Ben are gone spending time with their families, so it’s just been Rachel and me in the house. Andahuaylillas is a small town and we don’t know a lot of people yet, so we’ve spent a lot of days cooking, reading, and watching movies at home. Anda is a beautiful place and I’m enjoying getting to know my communitymates, but I often feel restless, like I’m still waiting for my time with JVC to start.

Throughout my time in spiritual direction at Fordham, the prayer my director most often sent me home with was “Patient Trust” by the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. He writes,

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.

Impatience has been a common theme for me, especially during the last six months. I like to be busy, and I tend to overcommit myself. I knew that the time between graduation in May and my departure for Peru at the end of November would be challenging, so I tried to make myself as busy as possible with things I enjoyed. When I tore my ACL at the beginning of June, I had just joined an ultimate Frisbee team, was playing soccer, working at the pool again, and had big dreams for running, climbing some fourtneeners, and spending as much time in the Rockies as possible before I headed off to Peru. All difficult things to accomplish with only one functioning anterior cruciate ligament.

Recovering from a torn ACL is a long, slow, and tedious recovery process and it forced me to start reflecting on what it means to be patient and still. I waited two months to get my surgery. After the surgery, I was on complete bed rest for a week (during which I thought I was going to go insane; God bless my poor mother who was on bed rest for the majority of her pregnancy with me. I am so sorry). When I was finally allowed to move around again, I could only do simple exercises, most of which were frustratingly difficult. Now I’m over four months out from surgery and I know that it will still be quite a long time before my knee has fully healed. I’m thankful for the progress that I’ve made, for access to good medical care, and for the knowledge that I will eventually heal completely, but I’m bored to tears with my PT exercises. I just want to run and climb and play soccer again, but there’s nothing I can do to speed up the healing process. All I can do is continue to complete the small tasks of bending, straightening, and strengthening, every day.

I’ve arrived in Peru and I feel the same impatience that I’ve been feeling with my knee. I’m impatient to start my job at the parish, to have a consistent schedule, and to feel like I have something constructive to do with my days here. I’m also anxious to leave the time of discomfort and newness behind me. I want to not have to think about words in Spanish before I say them, to remember people’s names, to know how to do things and get places. As Teilhard de Chardin says, I’d like to skip the intermediate stages, where I feel unsure and out of place. As anxious as I am to feel more comfortable and at home here in Andahuaylillas, though, I’m trying to remind myself that it’s the uncomfortable moments that sometimes foster the most growth. That last line of the 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,” has been echoing in my mind for the past few weeks. As much as I dislike that feeling, I’m trying, in JVC-speak, to “lean into the discomfort” that comes with being in a totally new place, and to allow myself to learn and grow from it.

Although I feel like I haven’t been doing much, I do know a lot more about Peru and the community of Andahuaylillas than I did before I got here. I’ve gotten to speak with people at the parish about some of the realities of life for people in the community. I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out and getting to know my three communitymates, goofing around with them and beginning to hear their stories. I’ve had the opportunity to start working on creating habits of self-care that will hopefully sustain me when things do get busy—to focus on prayer, journaling, exercise, writing letters to friends, and getting enough sleep for the first time since before high school. Small steps, but steps nonetheless. There will probably come a time when I’m much busier than I am now and I miss all of the down time. For now, I’m trying to recognize the small graces of each day, to allow them to form and challenge me, and to accept the anxiety and discomfort of feeling myself in suspense and incomplete.