Orientation...

Things are getting underway. I have now been oriented to all of my classes and the stress of syllabus overload has gotten to me. I'm exhausted, and the semester has barely begun! I have not yet started my chaplaincy and pastoral counseling practicums at the hospital, but I hope to begin by the end of this week. This past weekend I attended my spiritual guidance (aka Spiritual Direction) practicum which will be meeting once per month for 2 days at a time. I have one "regular" class that I'm taking this fall, Biblical Perspectives on Atonement.

I am still working in admissions and spent the entire day whittling away my to-do list that popped up on my screen first thing this morning. I managed to have all but one item accomplished by the end of the day. I also started my research assistant position with my faculty advisor this afternoon. My first order of business as a research assistant is to compile an annotated bibliography. Fortunately the research we are doing is all related to spiritual caregiving in the hospital, which will be very applicable to my chaplaincy practicum.

My spiritual guidance professor included the following poem in one of our handouts this weekend. We didn't read it in class, but I came across it this evening and I loved the honesty of its words:

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 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.

~Teilhard de Chardin

A wild orchid.
Picture taken at Assateague Island National Park, Virginia.