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

by Andrew Peterson

Whether you’re writing a sermon, a poem, or a mystery novel, you have to do the work of boiling it down.

Find out what’s essential, what’s sweetest, and boil away the rest.

Selectivity means choosing what not to say. It means aiming at the bull’s-eye.

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. It may be the only thing holding back the monsters. That story may be the only beautiful, true thing that makes it through all the ugliness of a little girl’s world to rest in her secret heart. May we take that seriously. It is our job, it is our ministry, it is the sword we swing in the Kingdom, to remind children that the good guys win, that the stories are true, and that a fool’s hope may be the best kind.

It doesn’t matter how many gadgets you have, or how much time and space you have, or how good your guitar is. At the end of the day, it’s just you and the song; you and the story.

Either you’re willing to steward the gift God gave you by stepping into the ring and fighting for it, or you spend your life in training, cashing in excuse after excuse until there’s no time left, no fight left, no song, no story.

Once I heard Anne Lamott speak to a group of writers, and she said, “The best thing you can do to write your book is to stop not doing it. Just stop it.”

The grass under my boots is something I don’t have to work to describe in a story—God did the work already, and I just have to walk.

In the words of poet Richard Wilbur, “The world is fundamentally a great wonder.”

We can hardly make anything beautiful that wasn’t beautiful in the first place. We aren’t writers so much as gleeful rearrangers of words whose meanings we can’t begin to know.

If you want to be an artist, you have to cultivate artistic discernment.

The masses—or at least those who don’t aspire to any sense of discernment—tend to choose the path of least resistance, which means the most bankable art is often the most vapid and loveless: noise, noise, noise. A clanging cymbal.

While it’s important to cultivate discernment, to work as hard as possible to do excellent work, to try really hard to make your song not bad, it’s just as important—perhaps more so, in the beginning—to make something, even if it’s not great. Don’t let your inner critic keep you from writing. Know that your songs aren’t going to be perfect. Then as joyfully as possible, keep writing. The only way to get better at something is to practice. It’s like we all have a quota of bad songs we have to meet before we get to a good one, so it’s best to start chipping away at the quota now. The sooner you start, the sooner you’ll learn. Besides, a “bad” song lovingly written for a friend, family member, or neighbor will be a far greater blessing to them than a great song you never wrote at all.

Maybe the song you’re writing is for one specific heartbroken soul who won’t be born for another four hundred years. Maybe you won’t meet him or her until the New Creation, and they’ll thank you for opening yourself to public scrutiny, for striving to arrange the words just so, for learning about what makes for a good melody or tight phrasing. By God’s grace, those little differences may be the bursts of wind that carry the song across the sea of time.

She says that artists need “resonators.” They need someone who gets what you’re trying to do, who is moved by your work and will encourage you to keep fighting when the battle is long.

Lewis was Tolkien’s resonator, and now, all these years later, we get to read about Frodo and Sam. Thank God for resonators.

Lewis and Tolkien, you won’t be surprised to know, spoke to both the sinful allure of being a part of an Inner Ring and the inherent creativity of all people.

The obvious one is that the community you’ve been given is the one you have to learn to love.

Write that song. Write that story. Homesickness is the way home.

I want you, dear reader, to remember that one holy way of mending the world is to sing, to write, to paint, to weave new worlds. Because the seed of your feeble-yet-faithful work fell to the ground, died, and rose again, what Christ has done through you will call forth praise from lonesome travelers long after your name is forgotten. They will know someone lived and loved here. Whoever they were, they will think, they belonged to God. It’s clear that they believed the stories of Jesus were true, and it gave them a hope that made their lives beautiful in ways that will unfold for ages among the linnea that shimmers in the moonlit woods. This is why the Enemy wants you to think you have no song to write, no story to tell, no painting to paint. He wants to quiet you. So sing. Let the Word by which the Creator made you fill your imagination, guide your pen, lead you from note to note until a melody is strung together like a glimmering constellation in the clear sky. Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor, too, by making worlds and works of beauty that blanket the earth like flowers. Let your homesickness keep you always from spiritual slumber. Remember that it is in the fellowship of saints, of friends and family, that your gift will grow best, and will find its best expression. And until the Kingdom comes in its fullness, bend your will to the joyful, tearful telling of its coming. Write about that. Write about that, and never stop.

“God may use my work to save some people and to test the faith of others, but that’s His business and none of mine.”

as long as you’re obedient to your gifting and your vocation, then accolades and record sales and being understood aren’t any of your business.

Rich Mullins used to say that what you said in between songs was just as important as the songs themselves.