BackstageHere is a scene from my actual life, repeated more mornings than I can count.
I sit down to write a song. I have the time blocked out. I have the coffee, the quiet, the instrument in my hands. I have decided, by an act of will, that today a melody will come. And I play, and nothing comes. Or worse, something comes and it is stale, a tune I have clearly heard before, warmed over and served back to me by a tired imagination. An hour passes. Two. I have done everything right, and the room stays empty.
Then, three days later, standing in a grocery line with no instrument and no intention, a whole melody arrives at once, fully formed, unbidden, almost rude in its timing — and I am fishing for my phone to hum it into a voice memo before the person behind me thinks I have lost my mind.
Anyone who makes things knows this maddening arrangement. The song will not come when summoned and will not stay away when it is finally ready. And for years I thought this meant I was doing it wrong — that a real professional would have mastered the machine by now, would be able to turn the crank and produce inspiration on a schedule. It took me a long time to understand that there is no crank. A song will not be bullied into being. And that is not a defect in the process. That is the process telling you the truth about how the deepest things actually come.
Two things at once, and you need both
The work of writing is discipline and surrender held together, and the mistake is always to try to get away with only one.
Surrender alone is a person who waits for the mood to strike and writes twice a year. They love the idea of being a songwriter. They are precious about inspiration, they talk about their gift a great deal, and they produce almost nothing, because they have confused waiting with laziness and dressed it up as artistic temperament. The muse, they say, has not visited. The muse is not the problem. The problem is they were not at the desk when she came by.
Discipline alone is the other failure, and it is subtler because it looks so responsible. It is the person who grinds — who forces, who fills the page by sheer effort and manufactures something technically complete and completely dead. You can hear it in a song. Craft with no breath in it. A tune that was assembled rather than received. It is the sound of a person who showed up but would not wait.
The truth sits in the tension between them, and it is exhausting because you cannot resolve it. You show up every single day, on schedule, with your hands ready — that is the discipline, and it is not optional; the melody in the grocery line only found me because I had spent a hundred fruitless mornings training my ear to catch it. And then, having shown up, you let go of the outcome. You wait. You cannot make the thing come. You can only be the kind of person, in the kind of posture, that it can come to.
I did not learn that framework from a music book. I learned it from the way God seems to work with people who are trying to follow him.
The cave was a studio
We have a whole book of songs in the middle of our Bible, and a great many of them were written by a man on the run. David wrote in caves, hunted, exhausted, frightened, some of his psalms marked in their very headings as songs from the days he was fleeing for his life. And what strikes me, reading them, is that he clearly did both things I have been describing. He showed up — he kept writing, kept turning his fear into structure, kept the discipline of putting the ache into ordered lines even when God felt absent. And he surrendered — he let the songs go where they wanted, into complaint, into terror, into a trust he could not manufacture and had to wait to feel arriving.
He did not bully those psalms into being. You can tell. The most famous of them do not read like a man forcing an upbeat feeling he does not have. They read like a man who kept showing up to the page and waiting, honest, until the resolution came — and sometimes it came within the same psalm, the tune turning from grief to trust in the last few lines, and sometimes it did not come at all and the song simply ends in the dark, still waiting.
That, to me, is the whole discipline of the spiritual life in miniature. You cannot command God to show up on your schedule. You cannot crank the handle and produce an experience of him. Anyone selling you that machine is selling you a counterfeit. But you can do the one thing that is actually yours to do: keep showing up. Keep your hands ready. Keep the quiet. Be at the desk when he comes by.
The waiting is not the enemy of the work
I want to say a hard and freeing thing to whoever is reading this in a dry season — of writing, of prayer, of faith, of any real work that has gone silent.
The empty mornings are not wasted. This is the part nobody tells you. All those hours I sat with an instrument and nothing came — I used to count them as loss. I no longer do. Those hours were not failure to produce a song. They were the training that made me able to receive one. The waiting was doing something in me the whole time, tuning the instrument that I am, so that when the melody finally passed by, I was ready to hear it instead of missing it entirely.
The ground looks idle in winter. It is not idle. It is working in a way that produces nothing you can point to, and that quiet, apparently fruitless labor is the exact condition of the spring. A farmer who dug up his field every February to check for progress would kill the harvest. The waiting is not the interruption of the work. The waiting is the work, done in a form your impatience cannot recognize.
So if you have been showing up faithfully to a thing that will not come — the prayer that stays unanswered, the calling that stays unclear, the healing that stays out of reach — I do not want to hand you a false promise that if you just try harder the crank will finally turn. It will not. There is no crank. But I will tell you what I have staked my working life on.
Keep showing up. Keep your hands ready. Do not force the false, stale, forced thing just to have something to show. And do not walk away from the desk in the dry season, because the whole point of the dry season is that it is making you into someone the true thing can finally reach.
The song is coming. Not on your schedule. But to the one who kept showing up to wait for it.
