Patient Trust Prayer

The Patient Trust prayer is a devotional reflection written by the Jesuit priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, opening with the line "Above all, trust in the slow work of God." It asks God for patience with a slow, unfinished process of change, whether that's happening in your own character, a relationship, a diagnosis, or a calling you're still waiting to understand. The full text above is the version most commonly quoted in prayer books and collections today.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote it, a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who served as a stretcher-bearer on the front lines of World War I. He wrote the words in a letter to his cousin, Marguerite Teillard-Chambon, dated July 4, 1915. He was not composing a prayer for publication; he was working through his own impatience with becoming a fuller version of himself in the middle of a war.

It comes from Teilhard de Chardin's wartime correspondence, first published in French in 1961 as "Genèse d'une pensée: Lettres 1914-1919" and later translated into English as "The Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919." The excerpt is commonly titled "Patient Trust" in prayer collections, though that title was added later by publishers; Teilhard himself was simply writing to a family member.

No, it isn't in the Bible; it's a 20th-century letter, not Scripture. Its central idea, that God works through a process rather than an instant, echoes several biblical passages, including Philippians 1:6 and Ecclesiastes 3:1, both quoted above. Many people pair this prayer with Scripture rather than treating it as a Bible passage itself.

Some of it was. His later scientific and theological writings on evolution, published mostly after his death, drew caution from Vatican authorities during his lifetime, and he was asked not to publish some of his major theological works while he was alive. This particular letter carries none of that controversy. It's a personal, pastoral reflection on patience, prayed today across Catholic and Protestant settings alike, without the doctrinal disputes that surround his later cosmological writings.

Read it slowly, one sentence at a time, and let it land on whatever in your life actually feels unfinished right now. Many people pray it during a specific waiting season, a job search, a recovery, a relationship still finding its footing, rather than as a daily routine prayer. The three shorter prayers on this page give you a way to pray the same idea in your own words when the full historical text feels too long for the moment.

It means God typically works through gradual stages rather than sudden completion, the way growth in nature moves through unstable, unfinished-looking phases before it settles. Teilhard's point is that feeling incomplete isn't a sign God has stalled; it's often what real change actually looks like from the inside, before it's finished.

Hospital and hospice chaplains use it often because it names the ache of a slow recovery or a slow decline without promising speed it can't deliver. Ohio State's Wexner Medical Center, for example, includes it in its patient and visitor spiritual care materials. It doesn't ask God to rush the process; it asks for patience and trust inside a timeline no one controls, which makes it a common choice for waiting rooms and recovery wards alongside more traditional healing prayers.

Teilhard wrote the original in French, and this excerpt has passed through translation, retitling, and decades of devotional anthologies before reaching most prayer sites and apps. Some published versions trim a sentence or swap a word for readability, which is why hospital handouts, retreat guides, and prayer collections don't always match word for word. The text above follows the standard English translation from "The Making of a Mind," the same rendering reprinted by sources like Ignatian Spirituality and university Jesuit communities.

That closing line is the hardest part of the prayer to actually live out. Teilhard isn't asking you to stop feeling anxious about an unfinished season; he's asking you to stop treating that anxiety as proof something has gone wrong. "Suspense" here means being genuinely unresolved, not knowing yet how a situation will turn out, and "incomplete" means the growth God is doing in you isn't finished. Accepting both, rather than fighting them, is what turns ordinary impatience into the kind of trust the rest of the prayer describes.