In Fall 2020, my Uncle Bob shipped his Lortone rock tumbler to me, along with a bunch of rocks he had collected over the course of many years. He knew my son was a collector— of rocks, coins, and random objects he used to call “beautiful things.” My uncle thought rock tumbling might be a nice hobby for our family while we were quarantining at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
He was right. In the midst of all the chaos and uncertainty, a nice hobby was very welcome. Basic rock tumbling requires four stages: coarse grinding, medium grinding, pre-polish, and polish, and each of these stages looks basically the same:
- Add your rocks, water, and grit in a rubber barrel.
- Close the barrel very, very tightly, and set it on the rotating rollers on the rock tumbling machine.
- Plug it in and leave it there for at least a full week. There are no settings to adjust. It has just one consistent gentle speed, 24 hours a day.
- After a week, you open the barrel, rinse the rocks off, and do it all again with a different consistency of grit.
The whole process takes at least a month from start to finish. There’s nothing you can do to make it go faster. The grit and water shape the rocks just a little bit at a time, slowly and steadily.
***
I think it’s fair to assume Fall of 2020 was a particularly difficult and uncertain time for most. At that point, over 200,000 Americans had died of Covid-191 and there was no sign that it would be under control soon. We were heading toward a particularly divisive Presidential Election (with other important positions and measures on the ballot as well). Our country, our communities, our churches and workplaces, and often even our own families and friends couldn’t agree about how to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. The vast majority of Americans were experiencing a deep division about what it looks like to care about each other, and that’s the kindest way I can put it.
In my family’s case, a new remote-learning school year had begun: 4th grade, 2nd grade, and Pre-K (those Pre-K Zoom classes were something else). My husband and I were both working full-time, both primarily from home. My Father-in-Law had terminal cancer, and we were struggling to find the right care facility for my dear Gramma to live safely with dementia.
Surely each of us remembers how hard this pandemic was in our own contexts. Every day, everyone I talked to just wanted to know things like: “How much longer will the pandemic last?” “What is God calling me to do with this time?” “What will life be like after this?” We all wished we had a crystal ball, or that we could speed up time.
***
In the middle of all that tension, fear, instability and uncertainty, we began a nice, new hobby with very, very, very slow results. Rock tumbling began to feel like a metaphor: there’s only so much you can do, and then you just wait.
I turned this into a weekly series for my church’s online worship services (we called it “Virtch”— virtual church). Each week for all four stages of the tumbling process, I shared an update about our rocks, using videos and pictures, and then I read the poem Trust in the Slow Work of God, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955).
Five years later, my family is still tumbling rocks on and off. In fact, we have a new batch turning right now. It seems as if the metaphor is as relevant today as it was in the fall of 2020— a different time, but an ever-poignant reminder that everything in life takes time. There’s only so much we can do, and the rest is patience and trust.
***
Trust in the Slow Work of God
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.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
***
1 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm
