PATIENCE FOR THE JOURNEY

"Look at the stone cutter 
hammering away at his rock,
perhaps a hundred times 
without as much as a crack showing in it.

Yet at the hundred-and-first blow
it will split in two,
and I knew it was not the last blow that did it,
but all that had gone before."
                                                  --Jacob A. Riis

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"Tell me the weight of a snowflake,"
a coal mouse asked a wild dove.
"Nothing more than nothing," was the answer.
"In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,"
the coal mouse said.
"I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk,
when it began to snow...
Since I didn't have anything better to do,
I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch.
Their number was exactly 3,741,952.
When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch --
nothing more than nothing, as you say--
the branch broke off..."

The dove, since Noah's time an authority on the matter,
thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself:
"Perhaps there is only one person's voice lacking
for peace to come about in the world."
                                                                --copied

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"ABOVE ALL, TRUST IN THE SLOW WORK OF GOD."
                                                       -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

[Ty: "Lord, I believe; Help my unbelief!"]