Celtic Proverbs
God’s Grace Comes with Patience

If grace is understood as a divine gift, then it cannot be willed; it must be bestowed and the best that we can do is to accept our emptiness and humbly wait for the void to be filled. Otherwise, we are presuming that the more we nag Him with our pleas and flatter Him with our posturing and insult His intelligence with our theological ramblings, the sooner will He smile an almighty smile and stretch out an almighty arm and render us spiritually invincible with a tongue of Pentecostal fire. That is not to say that we should not ask or hope or even expect, only that however fervently we pray and however patiently we wait, it is He who holds the initiative and He who calls the shots.

R. Martin Helick, Travelers From an Ancient Land, Book XII, An Chros, (Regent Graphics: Swissvale, PA, 1993)