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

by Andrew Peterson

calling, as I understand it, is to use whatever gifts I’ve been given to tell the truth as beautifully as I can.

You don’t need a record contract to serve God with your gifts. You don’t need to move to Nashville. You just need to stay where you are, play wherever you can, and keep your eyes peeled.

The best thing you can do is to keep your nose to the grindstone, to remember that 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.

Sail by the stars, not the flotsam.

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.

Since we were made to glorify God, worship happens when someone is doing exactly what he or she was made to do.

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.

A book is made up of sentences and paragraphs, and one look at the bookstore shelves should be enough to tell anyone that quality of writing is no prerequisite for being published. The one prerequisite for publication that is undeniable, it seems to me, is that one must write sentences and paragraphs.

Walt Wangerin Jr. said once that art isn’t art until it’s experienced by another.

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.

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.

I’m no longer surprised by my capacity for self-doubt, but I’ve learned that the only way to victory is to lose myself, to surrender to sacredness—which is safer than insecurity.

My Old Testament professor always pointed out when Jesus showed up in the Hebrew Scriptures, whether in theme, theophany, prophecy, or foreshadowing. And though I’d grown up memorizing verses and listening to thousands of my dad’s sermons, it wasn’t until I was eighteen in that class that I realized Jesus is the center of it all.

Intention trumps execution—remember that.

Standing on that stage while the crowd sings the doxology at the end is a thunderously good feeling, not only because it sounds so nice but because it reminds me that God sometimes gives us exactly what we asked for, and then some.

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.

We’re not invited into this because God needs us, but because he wants us.

If you wait until the conditions are perfect, you’ll never write a thing.

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

Let thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, in our house as it is in heaven.

Someone out there is building a bridge so we can slip across to elf-land and smuggle back some of its light into this present darkness. I’m always looking for that bridge.