The Slowest Drop in the World

In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell at the University of Queensland poured heated pitch — a derivative of tar — into a sealed glass funnel and waited three years for it to settle. Then he cut the stem and began to watch.

Pitch appears solid. You can shatter it with a hammer. But it is actually a liquid — roughly 230 billion times more viscous than water. It flows. It just flows so slowly that a single drop takes about a decade to form and fall.

Since 1930, only nine drops have fallen. Professor John Mainstone tended the experiment for over fifty years and never once witnessed a drop fall in person. He died in August 2013, still waiting. The ninth drop fell the following April.

There is something profoundly biblical in this. The psalmist writes, "Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!" (Psalm 27:14). Patience is not passive resignation. It is the active discipline of trusting that God is at work — even when the movement is too slow for human eyes to detect.

The pitch is always flowing. The Almighty is always moving. The fact that we cannot see progress does not mean nothing is happening. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is tend the experiment of our lives and trust that the drop will fall — not on our schedule, but in God's perfect time.