Today I started working on a long long-range project, henceforth called The Project of Mystery, TPM for short.
There are worthy things in life that require time to develop, ripen, become.
A quilt, for example—at least for me, in my time of life—is something that grows, bit by bit, over months. (I have completed all of two—three, if you count the grandchild’s small playquilt.) Yeast bread is a lazy half-day process, and soup may be “done” in an hour, but the flavors blend best after a couple of days of heating up and cooling off. 
Intimacy—the closeness of a life-mate, of sharing the spectrum of life’s moments together--this fragile (and maybe rare) gift is a slow-growing one
But I ask myself if some of the things that have come to me slowly would have appeared sooner if I had been a better learner. I think especially of earlier days in my life that took their shape from an underlying framework of duties, ought-tos, ought-nots, dos, don’ts.
The “ism” of my days was “legalism.” The thing that I missed for so long was grace. Was there a way I could have speeded the process up? Or was it necessary for me to spend time on the hamster wheel, to be concerned about pleasing God but not being pleased in God? Did I somehow need to be unenlightened for a long time and then come to a kind of enlightenment?
Psalm 1 promises that the righteous man brings forth his fruit in its season. I know that I have learned to enjoy the increments of the long-range projects—the processes of imagining, planning, performing the requisite steps, seeing the slow blossoming of a hand-sewn gift, a recipe, a relationship. The means have become as satisfying as the ends.
Perhaps the fruit of grace, too, has its own season.
