“So have obedience now to those older than you, and in good time you will also become experienced to benefit those who are younger. There will come a time when you will acquire what you don’t have now and seems difficult for you to accomplish, and you will wonder how you acquired it, since you had already stopped asking for it. These things will happen, as long as you persevere and keep seeking the purification of your soul, and that is enough. Anger will cease, peace will come, you will find dispassion commensurate to your work, and you will find the prayer. Just seek and exert yourself as much as you can. Everything is not achieved all at once; as with the body, you did not become a man from an infant all at once.”

Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast