Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making

by Andrew Peterson

I once heard someone suggest that in the new creation, the work of our hands will at last be equal to what we were able to imagine. But in the meantime, living as we do in dying bodies in a dying world, our best work always falls short of the initiating vision.

If you wait until the conditions are perfect, you’ll never write a thing. It’s always a matter of the will. The songs won’t create themselves, and neither will the books, the recipes, the blueprints, or the gardens.

Lead me home, Jesus. Let me die to my need to be someone important. Let me die to my need to leave a mark.

I looked out her window and saw crabgrass, old trucks, clouds of mosquitoes, and gravel roads, a rural slowth that drawled, “Here’s your life, son. Make do.” But my books said, “Here’s a sword, lad. Get busy.”

Now imagine dumping a sloshy bucket of that watery sap on a plate of pancakes. Trust me, the kids wouldn’t eat it. That’s what it’s like to listen to a song that’s about everything instead of one thing—it ends up being about nothing at all. Whether you’re writing a sermon, a poem, or a mystery novel, you have to do the work of boiling it down. But it’s important to remember that you don’t start with the syrup. You start with the sap, and then you get selective. That’s what you have to do with all your big ideas. Find out what’s essential, what’s sweetest, and boil away the rest.

It reminded me how vital it is that Christians bend low and speak tenderly to the children in our lives. These boys and girls at our churches, in our schools, down the street, are living a harrowing adventure. Every one of them falls into one of two categories: wounded, or soon-to-be-wounded. The depth and nature of those wounds will vary, but they’re

all malleable souls in a world clanging with hammer blows. The bigger they get, the easier the target.

Those of us who write, who sing, who paint, must remember that to a child a song may glow like a nightlight in a scary bedroom.

Maybe the song you’re writing is for one specific heartbroken soul who won’t be born for another four hundred years.