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

by Andrew Peterson

What on earth do I know? The doors open. Walk through them.

It may not take you to an easy chair in a Nashville mansion with a Grammy on the mantel; it probably won’t lead you to head-turning fame, and it probably won’t even lead you to a feeling that you’re a righteous, Kingdom-seeking saint. Because if that’s what you are you’ll probably feel more like a sinful, desperate cur who can get out of bed each day only because you’ve managed once again to believe that Christ’s mercy is made new every time the sun ascends.

It strikes me now that I was in possession of an inner-critic even then, which agitated me. I wanted to be content with my lame songs, but I couldn’t be. Whatever pride I felt was in having made something—anything at all—not necessarily in the quality of what had been made.

I was a grown-up. This wasn’t my first rodeo. I shouldn’t have felt that old fear, anxiety, or self-doubt, right? Then again, maybe I should have. As soon as you think you know what you’re doing, you’re in big trouble.

Cf. guy on Writer Files talking about imposter syndrome.

You happen upon a little pull-off with your index finger, a slightly different way of playing the same old chord. That sparks a melody that suits the gibberish a little better, and like a dying man in the desert who discovers a cactus, you get just enough juice to keep crawling.

I ask myself when I feel God’s pleasure, in the Eric Liddell sense, and it happens—seldom, to be sure, but it happens—when I’ve just broken through to a song after hours of effort, days of thinking, months of circling the song like an airplane low on fuel, searching desperately for the runway. Then I feel my own pleasure, too, a runner’s high, a rush of adrenaline. I literally tremble. There is no proper response but gratitude.

The one prerequisite for publication that is undeniable, it seems to me, is that one must write sentences and paragraphs.

Praise God, I was reckless enough to try this thing—not because my songs matter all that much, but because I would have possibly gone mad—a madness of self-hatred, self-disdain, self-flagellation. A madness of Self. “Take thy thoughts captive,” I imagine God saying. “Put them to music. Then aim them away from you. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

You have to believe that you’re precious to the King of Creation, and not just a waste of space.

And we have the pleasure of declaring God’s Kingdom with love, service, and peace in our homes and communities. When you pray, dedicate your home, your yard, your bonus room and dishwasher and bicycle and garden to the King. As surely as you dedicate your heart to him, dedicate your front porch.

At the risk of repeating myself, 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. A few days later I thrust the unfinished song upon Skye and Jamie, apologizing in advance for the discomfort such a performance would cause. 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.

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? I’ll probably always be self-conscious, so the battle to make something out of nothing at all will rage on, and I’ll have to fight it in the familiar territory of selfishness until the Spirit winnows my work into something loving and lovable.

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 book the tour before the songs are written. Sometimes you stand at the altar and say “I do” without any clue how you and your wife are going to make it. Sometimes you move to Nashville with no money in the bank and no real prospects. 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.

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.

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.

This is not an exercise in self-promotion or self-indulgence. This is for you. Whoever you are. Even if you means the future me. I cannot allow these thoughts to fester in isolation. They must be shared, aimed outward, scattered wild in the wind for some soul to discover.

Over the gateway of Self is a sign that says, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter.” It is a hellish, helpless place. Die to self. Live to God. Let your words and music be more beautiful by their death in the soil of worship, that the husk of your own imperfection might fall away and germinate into some bright, eternal song only God could have written.

Paul, who for a paragraph seems almost pathetic in his self-frustration, turns his eyes to Christ and then reminds himself and the rest of us that there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 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. Then get busy writing. Park the scooter in the field and write with abandon. Fight back. It’s a matter of life and death.

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. My final days in college were spent studying the books of Ezekiel and James in class, writing song lyrics in the margins of my syllabi, and reading, at last, The Lord of the Rings, that exquisite spray of refracted light.

So if songwriting is about patience, writing a book is about endurance. You don’t really need that flash of inspiration to write a book. In fact, the whole process is about as mundane as you can imagine, churning out pages made out of paragraphs made out of sentences made out of words. If inspiration comes, you don’t really know it until the book is finished. Not only that, the satisfaction of sharing it with someone is deferred for months, if not years.

Once he told me that the hard part is finding the clay, the raw material of the story. It takes work to harvest clay. You have to go to a stream and grab a bucket of mud, mix it with water, sift out the rougher sediment, pour off the water, allow the moisture to seep through a cloth for days. That’s your first draft. After that you get to flop the clay onto the pottery wheel and turn it into something better than mud, hopefully something both useful and beautiful. That’s revision. Whether you’re writing a song or a story, you have to shape it and reshape it, scrap it and start over, always working it as close as it can get to the thing it wants to become. But first you need that muddy lump, the first draft.

I had to learn that when you’re writing a song, you have to serve the work. 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. Let this song bring you glory, Father. Use it to lead someone home.” Then let the song suggest itself to you. Discover it. Fumble around in the dark room, feeling for the shape of it. Don’t use your agenda to bully it into being. And when you realize it wants to go somewhere you didn’t intend, let it. Be willing to trash the rest of the song (or the essay, or the painting, or the screenplay, or the sermon) if you have to in order to find the thing it wants to be.

If you want to know the mind of God, do what he says. Jesus, who knew the Father completely, also obeyed the Father completely. Similarly (though I know it’s a stretch), if you want to know what it’s like to be a songwriter, put on your tweed and write a song. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

But the song as it’s written is never as beautiful as it was in that fleeting, exhilarating moment of inspiration. The song’s potential is shimmering beyond the veil somewhere, while the song that you finally write is almost always haunted by a feeling of diminishment.

If you were to taste the maple sap before you boiled it down, which I did, you’d find it hard to believe there’s any sweetness hiding in there at all. 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.

The pond (the non-pond, rather) is a feature of our property I can’t stop thinking about. From our first day here seven years ago, I’ve voiced my desire to repair the dam and clear out the brush so that we can have a little fishing hole, something not just for the grandchildren but as a food source in case there’s an invasion like the one in Red Dawn. I’m only half-kidding. Something about having a few acres wakes up the survivalist in a man, which is part of why I so enjoy gardening nowadays. The less I depend on the machine the more connected I feel to the remnants of Eden shimmering at the edges of the natural world.

While the obsessive tendency can be a boon to someone with a career in the arts, the thing can come back to bite you. Because, like it or not, if you want to get paid to do this stuff you have to actually do the work. And once you realize you’re responsible for your family by either caring for the children or providing a full-time income, art—no matter how fun it was in the beginning—becomes work. It becomes a chore. It becomes burdensome. It’s suddenly so much easier to get excited about that other project that just won’t leave you alone. And so you start something new, which is natural and quite welcome. But then that gets old and you start four more new things, and you realize you’ve bitten off more than you can chew and nothing gets done, least of all the project that got you going in the first place. So as much as I may gripe about my teachers and parents and the busywork I was expected to do, there comes a time for us all when we have to reckon with it. Sometimes you have to do the work even if you don’t feel like it. Sometimes you have to put away your wants and do what needs to be done, which really means dying to self in order to find life. This is a way of practicing resurrection.

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.

You can’t blame your equipment. You can’t blame your lack of time. You can’t blame your upbringing. 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.

Tolkien started The Hobbit on the back of some papers he was grading. On any trip to the Hard Rock Cafe you’ll see hotel napkins and scraps of paper on which some of the world’s greatest songs were written. The secret is that there is no secret. All you need is to force yourself to do it.

So I look at the last album, the last book, and am forced to admit that I didn’t know anymore then than I do now. Every song is an Ebenezer stone, evidence of God’s faithfulness. I just need to remember. Trust is crucial. So is self-forgetfulness and risk and a measure of audacity. And now that I think about it, there’s also wonder, insight, familiarity with Scripture, passion, a good night’s sleep, breakfast (preferably an egg sandwich), an encouraging voice, diligence, patience. I need silence. Privacy. Time—that’s what I need: more time. But first I need a vacation, because I’ve been really grinding away at this other stuff and my mental cache is full. A deadline would be great. I work best with deadlines, and maybe some bills piling up. Some new guitar strings would help, and a nice candle.

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.

A few years ago a woman approached me after a concert. She explained that we had met about ten years earlier, and she had asked me to write some songwriting advice along with my signature on one of my old records. “Oh, no,” I said with a grimace, remembering how much worse my know-it-all tendencies used to be. “What did I write?” She smiled and opened the CD case. There it was in my handwriting, written with a Sharpie: Don’t write bad songs. —Andrew Peterson I blushed. “I’m sorry. What an arrogant thing to say.” “No, it’s okay,” she said. “You explained what you meant—that I should try hard not to settle.” She was being very gracious, because I know I probably felt really cool and edgy writing it at the time. She told me Andy Gullahorn had been at the same show, standing across the church lobby from me. She had taken the CD over to him and asked him to write some songwriting advice, too. “He saw what you wrote,” she said, “and then added this.” She turned the CD booklet over and showed me Gully’s signature. Next to his name he had written, “Write the bad ones, too.” Touché, Gullahorn. I see what you did there. He’s exactly right. And in a sense, so am I. 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 go...

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.

Tolkien wasn’t sure anyone would care about his nerdy fantasy world or his elvish language, and over the twelve years it took him to write what would later be known as one of the century’s greatest works of literature, he despaired of ever finishing it.

That’s community. They look you in the eye and remind you who you are in Christ. They reiterate your calling when you forget what it is. They step into the garden and help you weed it, help you to grow something beautiful.

I’ve said it before: there have always been poets underfoot. God just keeps making them. So keep your eyes peeled. People will surprise you with their gifts. And you’ll see how the friendships are augmenting everyone’s talent in one way or another.