Sometimes, I don’t understand God. I don’t understand the Gospel. What is God trying to tell me in this parable? Bewildered about how to write a reflection on something I wasn’t sure I could interpret, I looked up some Biblical commentary. Here’s the good news for me: The passage in today’s Gospel is considered difficult to understand by scholars. What exactly does Jesus mean to tell us about the dishonest steward? Commentators suggest the dishonest steward may have been giving up his own commission to make things right with his master. I like that explanation, but it may not be the right one.

My confusion made me think that perhaps God was telling me something else in this passage. Sometimes I might not understand completely. Maybe I don’t have to understand completely. God is asking for my love and my faith, which to me means taking that leap. I don’t always completely understand, but that shouldn’t stop me from praying, from asking God for the grace to understand and to ask for the grace to take that leap of faith, even when I don’t quite understand.

My prayer today is the prayer of Teilhard de Chardin, to ask God for patience and for God to be patient with me.

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.