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

by Andrew Peterson

I’m not afraid of hard work, but I do have an aversion to work that feels like a waste of time.

it takes a lot of work to hone your gift into something useful, and that you have to learn to enjoy the work—especially the parts you don’t enjoy.

We may want something harmless, but if it’s out of place, if it comes before the right thing, then what’s benign becomes malignant. We want the wrong thing.

“Jesus, help!” There’s no better prayer for the beginning of an adventure. Jesus, you’re the source of beauty: help us make something beautiful; Jesus, you’re the Word that was with God in the beginning, the Word that made all creation: give us words and be with us in this beginning of this creation; Jesus, you’re the light of the world: light our way into this mystery; Jesus, you love perfectly and with perfect humility: let this imperfect music bear your perfect love to every ear that hears it.

creative act as a kind of worship, as a way to be human. Since we were made to glorify God, worship happens when someone is doing exactly what he or she was made to do.

The spark of the idea was hope; the work that led to the song was faith; the completion of the song leads to worship,

Each of us is a character, in both senses of the word. At times, characters become aware that they’re part of a story, and that brings the realization that, first, there is an author, and second, they are not him.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I can’t learn without doing; I won’t know the story until I write it down. As long as the idea stays in the conceptual realm it withers.

And yet, at war with that desire to be invisible is a yearning to be seen and known and valued.

In the beginning it wasn’t about glorifying my Maker—it was about declaring my own existence, for my own sake. It took a long time to realize that was a dead end. Literally.

After that, the Lord can redeem your impulse for self-preservation by easing you toward love, which is never about self. But if you’re scared, there’s no rush. First you have to do something.

It’s a matter of dedicating to God the world within our reach.

The Christian’s calling, in part, is to proclaim God’s dominion in every corner of the world—in every corner of our hearts, too.

can be boiled down to one little word: beloved. That’s it. And that’s why it’s so silly (and perilous) to use your gifting to clothe yourself with meaning. Those clothes will never quite fit.

That little performance is a crucial stage in the making of a song. You hear the song’s weaknesses because you’re able to listen to it through their ears.

have to accept the fact that I’m beloved by God. That’s it. Compared to that, the songs don’t matter so much—a realization which has the surprising consequence of making them easier to write.

It was like God had written a concept album called the Bible, and I had finally realized what the

story was. The story was Jesus. Everything clicked into place once I put him in the center.

You can think and plan and think some more, but none of that is half as important as doing something, however imperfect or incomplete it is. Intention trumps execution, remember?

Sometimes you start with nothing and hope it all works out. Not sometimes—every time. All you really have is your willingness to fail, coupled with the mountain of evidence that the Maker has never left nor forsaken you.

Not sometimes—every time. All you really have is your willingness to fail, coupled with the mountain of evidence that the Maker has never left nor forsaken you.

my enjoyment of the show was amplified by the simple truth that it’s not my show at all. I’m pleasantly expendable, delightfully unnecessary. We’re not invited into this because God needs us, but because he wants us.

I scratched out words and wrote what I thought were better ones, aiming at something excellent even as I was aware of how pathetically short I fell.

This was something precious and private, and the next time I wrote something like this I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone, sometime, would read the words and pass some sort of judgment on them, or on me.

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,

Richard Wilbur, is called “The Writer.”

Writing is always a matter of life or death, he says, and finding the right arrangements of words is like being a bird trapped in a house, trying to find its way through the open window.

fight an opposing force in order to bring something beautiful into the world, I resonate. I believe there’s a Resistance, and it’s made up of what Paul called the rulers, the authorities, the cosmic powers over this present darkness, the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places (Eph. 6:12). If you’re called to speak light into the darkness, then believe this: the darkness wants to shut you up.

art shouldn’t be about self-expression or self-indulgence. Art shouldn’t be about self. The paradox is that art is necessarily created by a Self, and will necessarily draw some measure of attention or consideration to the artist. But the aim ought to be for the thing to draw attention, ultimately, to something other than the Self.

can lead the audience beyond me and to the Ultimate Self, the Word that made the world.

Let your words and music be more beautiful by their death in the soil of worship,

And as soon as you start talking about the other person, you stop looking awkward and self-conscious. You look like you. It’s all about the other person.”

Jesus was right all along. We are most ourselves when we’re thinking least about ourselves. It reminds me of Paul’s rant in Romans 7, when he talks about how he wants to do one thing but then does another, and you can just hear his frustration with himself. That passage has brought me such comfort merely through commiseration. But it’s really a passage about self-consciousness. At the end he asks, “Who will save me from this body of death?” (v. 24). And his answer is almost a sigh of relief: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25). Self, self, self—then Christ, Christ, Christ.

Tear your attention away from your shame, your self-loathing, your self-consciousness, your self. Now, rejoice. Become who you were meant to be, who you already are in Christ.

Was it worldliness or was it the Holy Spirit pulling me toward something? I just couldn’t tell.

I tell you all this because place matters.

But wherever you are, you might as well go ahead and pull up the carpet. Make it beautiful, even if you can’t afford it. Let your imagination run wild. Give your house a name.

The Kingdom is coming, but the Kingdom is here. That’s why we’re homesick, and it’s also why we might as well get busy planting.

“Here’s your life, son. Make do.” But my books said, “Here’s a sword, lad. Get busy.” A persistent fear sizzled in my heart, a fear that there existed no real adventure other than the one on the page, and that I was doomed never to know it. Doomed to a life of failure.

Looking back, the same was true of my obsession with comic books and films and music. In each of those art forms I encountered a world that seemed more vivid than the one I was in.

Scripture tells us that when God looks at a Christian he sees Christ’s righteousness—in a similar way, the Christian is now free to see Christ in everything.

God allowed the stories to lift the veil on the imaginary world to show me the real world behind it—which ended up being, in the end, the one I was already in.

Songwriting is about resonance.

Rich Mullins said: songwriting is like going fishing. Sometimes you sit by the pond all day and never catch a thing. But sometimes you snag something beautiful. The point is, you never know unless you go to the pond and wait.

So if songwriting is about patience, writing a book is about endurance.

but the thrill fades so quickly for both me and them that it’s more like bumping into your plumber at the grocery store than meeting an actual famous person.

but the steady resonance of your work might move someone closer to the Kingdom—and compared to a human heart, planets are small potatoes.

Whether they believe in God or not, there’s always a tone of reverence, surprise, or even befuddlement when they talk about it.

One is that the thing came to them along the way, which is to say the real flash of inspiration came not before they started working, but during the process. Another common thread is that the story or song seems to have a will of its own.