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October 23, 2019 - July 6, 2020
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.
Walt Wangerin Jr. said once that art isn’t art until it’s experienced by another.
I confess, a mighty fear of irrelevance drove me to this vocation, a pressing anxiety that unless you looked back at me with a smile and a nod and said, “Oh, I see you. You exist. You are real to me and to this world and we’re glad you showed up,” I might just wither away and die.
After that, the Lord can redeem your impulse for self-preservation by easing you toward love, which is never about self.
You and I are anything but irrelevant. Don’t let the Enemy tell you any different. We holy fools all bear God’s image. We’re walking temples of the Spirit, the bashful bride of Christ, living stones in what is going to be a grand house, as holy and precious as anything else in the universe, if not more so. God is making us into a Kingdom, a lovely, peaceful one, lit by his love for us flowing toward one another. That’s the best gift you have to give.
I want people to sense God’s presence when they roll up our gravel driveway.
Still, every sacred word that Becky wrote on every sacred plank of wood was a reminder to her that it was not her house, but God’s.
When you pray, dedicate your home, your yard, your bonus room and dishwasher and bicycle and garden to the King.
We are sacred, you and I.
We need not look anywhere but to the eyes of our Savior for our true identity, an identity which is profoundly complex, unfathomable, deep as the sea, and yet 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.
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.
It’s difficult, yes. But it doesn’t change a thing about who we are.
this is how it works. It’s not magic. It’s work. You think, you walk, you think some more, you look for moments to hammer it out on the piano, then you think again.
It’s like taking your mom to a film you love, and only then realizing how offensive the language is.
Do you see how God redeemed, and continues to redeem, the broken and selfish motives that drove me here? How all those fears that bang around in my head are gathered, sifted like wheat, and then turned into something better than self-expression, self-preservation?
Fighting through month after month of trying to pay the bills on the road, singing songs on my other albums about life and love and struggle, then coming back together each December to sing about Jesus and only about Jesus was like performing yearly maintenance on my soul.
that year and every year since 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.
We’re invited to join with all nature in manifold witness to his great faithfulness—and since creation is going to declare it either way, we might as well jump in with our half-finished songs and join the chorus.
If you wait until the conditions are perfect, you’ll never write a thing.
Sometimes you’ve done all the planting you need to do, and it’s time to start weeding the garden.
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.
lead the audience beyond me and to the Ultimate Self, the Word that made the world.
Lead me home, Jesus. Let me die to my need to be someone important. Let me die to my need to leave a mark.
The reintroduction of fairy tales to my redeemed imagination helped me to see the Maker, his Word, and the abounding human (but sometimes Spirit-commandeered) tales as interconnected. It was like holding the intricate crystal of Scripture up to the light, seeing it lovely and complete, then discovering on the sidewalk a spray of refracted colors. The colors aren’t Scripture, nor are they the light behind it. Rather, they’re an expression of the truth, born of the light beyond, framed by the prism of revelation, and given expression on solid ground.
A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it, too.”5 George MacDonald
But a songwriter is also a person who is sad about something and wants other people to be sad about it too, or is confused by something and wants others to feel that confusion. Songwriting is about resonance.
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.
You pour just as much of your heart into a story, though, and the kicker is, nobody’s going to read it for a long, long time. You could be not just barking up the wrong tree but hunting in the wrong forest altogether and not know it until you’re considerably older. Not only that, even after the book is finished, there’s a good chance that a lot of your friends will never read it. Either they’re not readers, they’re not into the genre, or they just don’t have the time.
Fear is a mighty wind, and some of us merely have a creative spark.
I used to think, arrogantly, that once I was a Real Author or a Professional Musician, people would be impressed. I’m here to tell you they really, really aren’t—not for long, at least. Hearing your own song on the radio is one of the coolest experiences in the world, and so is seeing your book on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. But after the thrill fades, you’re still just plain old you.
People think it’s cool and they’re usually very kind, 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. And that’s exactly as it should be.
So when I teach about writing, my hope is that the principles are cross-disciplinary and will enrich more than just your area of interest. If you’re a writer, cultivating these principles may not lead to a good living, but they can lead to a good life. You won’t end up with a black box that will break the earth in half, but the steady resonance of your work might move someone closer to the Kingdom—and compared to a human heart, planets are small potatoes.
One great problem with much art that’s called “Christian” is agenda, which is to say that it’s either didactic, or manipulative, or merely pragmatic—in other words, the artistic purity of the work tends to take a back seat to the artist’s agenda. L’Engle says art that isn’t good is, by definition, not Christian art, while on the other hand art that’s good, true, and beautiful is Christian art, no matter what the artist believes.
Agenda is bad when it usurps the beauty. Christian art should strive for a marriage of the two, just as Christ is described as being “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Truth without beauty can be a weapon; beauty without truth can be spineless. The two together are like lyric and melody. This is not to say that beauty itself isn’t a kind of truth, nor that truth itself isn’t beautiful.
Christian art, then, might be defined as a work that is, like Christ himself, full of grace and truth.
The beauty, by its excellence, bears the truth to the world in a way that seasons culture and can arrest the attention of the staunchest atheist.
I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I’m a Christian who is an artist, who usually tries to make Christian art
I began to understand the peril of asking God to let you write songs that would comfort the lonely and brokenhearted—peril, because the only way to do that is to walk through the dark forest of loneliness and heartbreak.
You have to remember that the God the song is about knows more than you do about songwriting. Your agenda should be broad: “Let this song be a light in someone’s darkness.
That’s when agenda is bad. When you cast all mystery out the window because you want to make a point, you’re in essence declaring yourself the master and not the servant. Be humble.
If you want to know the mind of God, do what he says.
At some point (usually thanks to the mercy of a deadline), you have to put down the brush and give thanks for the chance to have made an attempt.
A few years ago I was talking with Sally Lloyd-Jones, and she described the way she felt going into her new project: “I feel like I’m following clues.”
Always, always remember to love the listener.
Don’t show off. Don’t use esoteric language unless it’s there for a reason. Don’t sacrifice the song’s effect on the altar of your ego.
At the very least, in a world where we walk around numb as lepers so much of the time, a song can make you actually feel something, a tingle in a place you thought long dead. That’s what the best songs—the best works of art—do for me.
Dash all pretense; be who you are; kick down the walls; love the listener.
His point was this: don’t get philosophical. Don’t write the song for everybody. Just pretend like you’re talking. Pretend you’re looking him in the eye and opening your heart to your little boy. Try to forget that you’re writing a song and focus on the kid in front of you.
whether or not you like how it turned out, I managed to write it in a way that my thirteen-year-old kid could receive it as love from his papa.
The trouble isn’t that there isn’t anything to write about; the trouble is that there’s too much.
