Today my city came out of its fifth COVID-19 lockdown in two years. Time functions differently when you’re in lockdown, partly because you cannot do many of the things you’d normally do, and because weekdays and weekends bleed into each other, but also because we slow down and notice what we wouldn’t normally. I spend much time in lockdown looking at our trees and observing their leaves or their lack, and the smallest signs of new growth or flowers.
When we emerge out of lockdown, it can feel disorienting at first, partly as though nothing has changed, partly as though we do not know what is normal any more. Time functions differently at these moments too. Was it only yesterday we were here last? Or was it yesterday that we were in the midst of our five months of lockdown? What feels recent and what feels long ago gets rearranged.
Time can also feel discouraging. We might ask: Why do we keep returning here? We t feel disconnected from the times in the past when none of this was real. We might fear that those times will not return.
Last week I was reminded in my devotional reading of a wonderful quote from the 20th-century Jesuit writer Pierre 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.
True for beating a pandemic. True for the daily slog of growing in Christ.
And when we slow down, as in lockdown, we might ironically see growth happening in stasis. Little snowdrops are peeking through the grass. Iris stalks are pushing up from the ground ready to split open and bud. And the almond tree, Jeremiah’s symbol of watching and waiting, is budding in perfect white blossoms. My wife and I bought that almond tree when we lost our first pregnancy. Now we have three children. The almond tree has yet to bear fruit that we can eat but each year it blossoms in promise. Each year we watch and wait. And each year God promises: “I am watching over my word to perform it.” (Jeremiah 1:12) Comforted by small signs of promise fulfilled, we slowly learn to trust the slow work of God.
The Consolations of Writing 