In his final speech to the next generation of Christ followers, the Apostle Peter makes this closing statement: “Do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.” I imagine it took many years for the young, brash, bold, forward-leaning Peter to learn this one lesson about God’s pace. God’s pace and our pace are not the same. If that were true in Peter’s day, how much more in our own!

Japanese theologian writes in his book, Three Mile an Hour God: ‘Love has its speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice or not, at three miles an hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks.’  So God’s speed is 3 miles an hour, He sometimes chooses to use 1000 years to get something done we would like to see done in one day. As leaders, it is our task to slow down in order to catch up with God.

Trust in the Slow Work of God By 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 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.