Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on... you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself. Gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come, and not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God's love.

Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your own life in the service of a myth. If you can get free from the dominance of causes and just serve Christ's truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. The real hope then is not in something we can do, but in God who is making something good out if it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God's will, we will be helping in this process.

Thomas Merton - Prophet in the Belly of a Paradox