Trusting the Slow Work
Patience with gradual transformation.
Kenji Watanabe had been waiting to feel different for three years, and the waiting was beginning to feel like the problem itself.
He was forty-three, a Japanese-New Zealander living in Auckland, a secondary school mathematics teacher with a precise mind and the particular impatience of someone who understands systems and expects them to produce results on a predictable timeline. He was good at identifying patterns, tracing causes to effects, working backward from outcomes to understand the process that produced them. It was what made him a good teacher. It was also what made his spiritual life consistently frustrating, because the process he most wanted to understand and track was the one that refused to behave like a system.
He had become a Christian at forty, which was late enough that he had come to faith as a fully formed adult with well-established habits of thought and a reasonably settled understanding of how he worked. His conversion had been genuine and, in the way of people who arrive at faith after decades of scepticism, thorough: he had read widely, thought carefully, and arrived at belief not as an emotional event but as the conclusion of a long and serious interior investigation.
What he had not anticipated was that becoming a Christian would not immediately make him more like the person he wanted to be.
He had expected transformation to be more. efficient than it was.
Three years in, he still had the temper he had always had: not explosive, but sharp-edged in moments of frustration, the specific kind that came out most clearly with the people he was closest to. He still had the pride that made receiving criticism difficult and admitting mistakes feel disproportionately costly. He still struggled with an anxiety that ran as a low background frequency through most of his days, spiking in the evenings when the day's work was done and the mind had nothing to occupy it and went looking for things to worry about.
He had prayed about all of these things. He had read about them. He had confessed them and received grace for them and determined to do better. And then he had done better for a while, and then he had done the same thing again, and the cycle of genuine intention followed by familiar failure was beginning to feel like evidence of something he did not want it to be evidence of.
He brought it to his pastor, a Samoan-New Zealander named Pastor Faleolo, a large and unhurried man who had been in ministry for thirty years and had the specific quality of someone who had watched enough people grow to know what growth actually looked like from the outside when the person inside it could not see it.
Kenji sat across from him and laid out the situation with the precise, slightly frustrated clarity of a mathematician describing an equation that was not resolving correctly.
"I am not changing," he said. "Or if I am changing, it is happening so slowly I cannot detect it. And I am not sure whether that means I am doing something wrong or whether it means the process does not work the way I thought it did."
Pastor Faleolo listened without rushing. Then he said something that surprised Kenji, not because it was complex but because it was so simple he had somehow never quite thought it.
"Kenji," he said. "How long does it take to grow a kauri tree?"
Kenji knew this. Every New Zealander knew this. A kauri, the great native tree of the north, grew for centuries. The ancient ones standing in the Waipoua Forest had been growing for two thousand years. They were among the largest and oldest living things in the Southern Hemisphere.
"A long time," he said.
"A very long time," Pastor Faleolo agreed. "And if you stood beside a kauri seedling every single day and watched it, you would not be able to see it growing. The daily increment is too small for human eyes to detect. But the growth is happening. Underground first: the roots going down before anything significant appears above the surface. Then slowly, slowly, the trunk thickening. The canopy broadening. Over decades. Over centuries."
He let the image settle.
"You have been a Christian for three years," he said. "You are looking for kauri results on a seedling timeline. But God is not in a hurry with you. He is building something that is meant to last."
Kenji drove home with that image sitting in the front of his mind.
He was not a gardener. He was a mathematician. But the kauri metaphor had arrived in a way that bypassed his analytical defences and lodged somewhere more useful, in the place where images do their work.
He opened his Bible that evening to a passage he had read before but not recently: Philippians 1:6. "Being confident of this: that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus."
Carry it on to completion. Not: will complete it on your preferred schedule. Not: will produce visible results within a timeframe you find satisfying. Will carry it on. Present and future continuous. Ongoing. The work already begun, already in progress, moving toward its completion with the unhurried certainty of Someone for whom three years is a very short beginning.
He sat with that word: completion. It implied a finished thing. A thing with a specific intended end. A thing being worked toward with purpose and intention, even when the daily increments were too small to see.
He was a seedling being grown toward something he could not yet imagine. And the One doing the growing had been growing things since before time and had not yet failed to complete what He started.
That was either the most reassuring thing he had ever heard or the most challenging. He decided it was probably both.
His wife, Hiromi, a quietly perceptive woman who had grown up in a Buddhist family in Osaka and had been watching her husband's faith with the curious, respectful attention of someone trying to understand something from the outside, noticed something he had not noticed himself.
They were having dinner on a Friday evening, the relaxed kind of dinner that the end of a school week allows, and she said, not for the first time but in a different way: "You were very patient with the boys today."
He looked up. Their two sons, eleven and thirteen, had been in a sustained argument throughout the afternoon that had eventually required parental intervention. He remembered being frustrated. He also remembered not saying the sharp thing that had come to mind, and redirecting the conversation with a steadiness that had surprised even him in the moment.
"Was I?" he said.
"More than you used to be," she said. Not as a compliment exactly. As an observation. The way Hiromi made most observations: precise and without inflation.
He thought about that later in the evening. He had not felt more patient in the afternoon. He had felt frustrated and had managed it differently than he once would have. The feeling had not changed. The response to the feeling had.
That was growth. He had not recognised it as growth because it did not look like what he had been expecting growth to look like. He had been watching for the absence of the frustration. He had not noticed the change in what he did with it.
He brought this observation to his men's group the following Thursday, a gathering of seven men from different backgrounds who met at a cafe before the working week began on Thursday mornings at six-thirty, an hour that required commitment and rewarded it.
He described the dinner table moment, the frustration he had felt and the different response he had produced, and the realisation that he had been measuring transformation by the wrong metric.
One of the men in the group, a Welsh-New Zealander named Gareth who was in his fifties and had been a Christian for twenty-five years, leaned forward with the expression of someone who recognised the territory exactly.
"I spent the first ten years of my faith waiting to stop being angry," Gareth said. "And I kept failing that test. Then one day my wife told me something I have never forgotten. She said: you have not stopped being angry. But you have changed what you do with it. You used to take it out on people. Now you go for a walk or you pray. That is not nothing. That is actually everything."
He looked around the table.
"We are looking for the wrong thing," he said. "We are looking for the old nature to disappear. But Paul said put off the old self and put on the new. It is a process of putting off and putting on, repeatedly, for your whole life. The victory is not that you stop feeling the old things. It is that you get better at choosing the new response. One time. One day. Then another. Then another."
Romans 12:2 arrived in Kenji's reading the following morning with a freshness it had not previously had: "Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind."
Be transformed. Passive voice. Not: transform yourself through sufficient effort. Be transformed. Receive the transformation. Cooperate with the process. Stay in the conditions that allow the work to continue.
Renewing. Present continuous. Not a single event but an ongoing process. The mind being renewed. Incrementally. Daily. In the direction of something it was not yet fully but was becoming.
He began paying different attention to his own interior life after that. Not with the evaluative eye of someone assessing whether the project was on schedule, but with something more like the patient, interested attention of someone watching a slow and beautiful thing develop.
He noticed when he chose the patient response over the sharp one. He noticed when he prayed before reacting rather than reacting and then praying. He noticed when the anxiety that visited in the evenings was met with a practiced turning toward God rather than a spiral into the things it was pointing at.
He wrote these things in a journal, not to catalogue his own progress but to train his attention on what God was actually doing rather than what Kenji thought should be happening.
There were still failures. He still said the sharp thing sometimes. He still let the anxiety run longer than it needed to. He still had the pride that made certain moments harder than they should have been. He did not pretend otherwise and did not intend to.
But the failures had a different quality now. They were no longer evidence that the process was broken. They were the normal imperfection of someone in the middle of a process that was not finished yet. Of a seedling still growing. Of a kauri tree on day one thousand and ninety-five of what would be a multi-century journey.
He took his boys to the Waipoua Forest on a weekend in autumn. He had not been since he was a child himself, and he wanted them to see Tane Mahuta: the Lord of the Forest, the largest living kauri, approximately two thousand years old, standing in the quiet of the ancient forest with the particular, unhurried authority of something that has simply been doing what it was made to do for a very long time.
They stood at the barrier and looked up at it in silence, which was not how his boys usually operated and told him something about what the tree did to people who stood in front of it.
His younger son, Ren, said: "How long did it take to get that big?"
"Two thousand years," Kenji said.
Ren was quiet for a moment. "That is a long time to grow," he said.
"It is," Kenji agreed.
He stood there looking at Tane Mahuta and thought about Pastor Faleolo and the seedling and the three years that had felt too slow to be real growth and the dinner table moment Hiromi had noticed and Gareth's words about putting off and putting on.
He thought about a God who was not impatient with slow growth because He had been growing things since before the forest itself, and who had never once abandoned something He had started, and who was working in Kenji Watanabe, mathematics teacher, forty-three years old, three years into something that would take a lifetime and was worth every unhurried, imperceptible, faithful day of it.
The slow work. He was in it. God was in it with him.
That was enough.
That was, when you stood before a two-thousand-year-old tree and let the scale of the thing do its work on you, considerably more than enough.
"Being confident of this: that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." Philippians 1:6
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