BitterSweetLife

Recently I spent considerable time writing several sets of song lyrics. (See a somewhat less-than-serious invention here.) The idea was that a friend of mine would put my words to music—a little creative collaboration. Unfortunately, as often happens with partnerships, one of the partners retracted. (It wasn’t me.)

Musing on these circumstances gave me another excuse to think about heaven—one of my favorite topics. (See Heaven Recurrence below.) I feel a certain sense of regret over my “wasted” lyrics. Obviously, all artists have an affinity for what they create, even if the results aren’t what we’d call amazing. The feeling is unavoidable. But consider the pathos if the “wasted” work was actually incredible. And there’s the analogy.

My unused lyrics raise questions. Like Why did I bother? And mainly… Why weren’t they used? God deals with such questions on an infinitely higher (and infinitely less trivial) scale. He looks at many of us with a similar feeling of query:

Why are you wasting what I gave you to use? Why do my words—my notes, my choreography, my blueprint—lie dormant? Where’s the song? Where’s the story, the dance, the building? There is no flesh on your spirit-bones!

And we, like preoccupied musicians, ignore the lyrics Christ has given us to set to music. He’s given us the essential plot of a story, but we don’t have time to read…much less enter.