Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing live your way into the answer.   – Rainer Maria Rilke

I think I’m being invited to grow in patience. On my retreat week in October, as I stood in the centre of the labyrinth, I felt the change of seasons all around me. There is a time to let go of things, a time to be dormant, and a time to welcome new life to emerge. I’m in a time of letting go: letting go of past connections, of old belongings, of old ways and habits, of old responsibilities and also of expectations that I brought with me concerning my/our new life. I’m in a time of letting go, and simply being patient, living within the ambiguity, uncertainty, unknowing of this season of life.

I was given the Rilke quote in my Weight Watchers meeting two weeks ago and found it complemented my retreat work so beautifully. I settled down even more to waiting patiently in the unknowing of my new life. I’m not ready to hear the answers yet. I’m not ready to know what my new life will be. I know God’s Spirit is alive and would give me answers if I needed them, but I don’t. I can wait before unopened doors and be content. I can be alive in the uncertainty. How wonderful! I can be fully alive in the uncertainty of a new life. I don’t need to know. What a relief that is!

Patience. Waiting. Trusting.

Do you have unanswered questions in your life? What would it look like for you to put them behind a closed door? That could look like giving them to God in prayer, or writing them on a paper and placing them in a ‘God-Box’. Then you can pull up a chair and wait before the door.

Have patience as you wait with God, in everything that is unresolved in your life. Enjoy today.

Love and prayers

Anne

Mystic in Motion

Contemplative Fire, Community Leader Canada