A few years ago, I went through a particularly difficult personal time. I had just returned to school after a holiday break, and in my loneliness, I was confronted anew with my sinful nature. But this wasn’t the typical momentary struggle that so often can be forgotten in the morning after a good night’s sleep. No, this turned into a depression that overwhelmed my life for a number of weeks. I didn’t sleep well. I could barely maintain focus on those things that I needed to do for class, and I felt disconnected and empty when going to Scripture.
During this dark time, I prayed in much the same way that I had done numerous times before that the Lord would “take this thorn from me” (2 Corinthians 12:8). While I know Scripture indicates that Paul only issued his request three times, I guess I’m a bit stubborn and slow to get the message because over the course of my life I’ve offered this petition numerous times—most certainly more than three. Needless to say, as with all the previous times, my request was not granted, and my struggles persisted. I got very little sleep and gave little quality attention to my schoolwork, and my time with God suffered greatly.
I had no idea where to go in Scripture, so by this point, I was jumping around the Bible, looking for some passage that might possibly speak truth and encouragement to me. I started in the Epistles and then moved to the Gospels. Not satisfied, I then went to the history books of the Old Testament and finally to the Prophets. But nothing provided any peace. I was at a loss and about to give up for good, but then I decided to read through the Psalms. I used to think that reading the book of Psalms was a sort of cop-out, but since nothing else in Scripture seemed to alleviate the ache, I decided to read one psalm a day as a sort of last resort.
It wasn’t long before I was doing more than just reading a psalm each day. I read and reread the psalm a number of times each day and found myself easily lost in meditation. I was connecting with them in ways I hadn’t before, and it wasn’t long before reading and meditation turned into prayer. At first, these prayers were merely repetitions of the themes in the psalms, but the prayers soon shifted focus to areas of my life needing to be addressed. These areas were often things that I was struggling with at the time and at other times things I felt but had never been able to verbalize. At other times I was confronted with issues in my past that I had not ever fully dealt with.
This pattern of reading, prayer, and meditation continued for quite some time. Each day I would lie on a spot on the floor and have the Bible in front of me. Leaning on my elbows, I would read the psalm a few times and then lie face down, meditating and praying. Many days I was moved to tears, and at times I felt like I was in the presence of God. On other days I felt alone and in a vacuum. Regardless of my daily experience, I chose to continue the habit of reading, meditating, and praying through the Psalms. Even when a school project was pressing or a test was around the corner, I kept my appointment with God on the floor and in the Bible.
• • •
On the surface, what I’ve just described is not much different from many of my previous efforts. But another thing was happening in my life during this time; I was becoming more interested in the arts and the human creative impulse. This interest was not new, for as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed the arts even though I’ve frequently felt a tension between the arts and the seemingly rigid doctrinal compartments of Christianity. What I mean is that on the one hand, I was very comfortable with logic and reason, even teaching apologetics for a number of years in a Christian high school. But on the other hand, I always felt that a solely rational approach to Scripture was disconnected from my experience. Logic, reason, and proper exegesis of Scripture helped me understand God in a way that I could love him with my mind, but my heart often felt untouched.
Absolute, unchanging, and divine truth is one thing, but human experience is another. Emotions, angst, turmoil, and joy—these things were often left out of my theology. This disconnect was felt in my heart and at the edges of my mind, but I could never put a finger on its root cause. But through the writings of George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy Sayers, and others on creativity, imagination, fantasy, and the arts, I started to understand this tension. It was Dorothy Sayers’s work The Mind of the Maker that helped me the most. She builds her premise from the observation that the primary thing to know about God by the time man was declared to be made in his image in Genesis 1:27 is that he is a creator. And thus, for her, it seems to follow that at least part of what being made in God’s image means is that we are creative as well. We do not choose to be creative. Rather we are creative.
It’s true that Scripture has much more to say about the imago Dei, but we would be remiss if we didn’t pay attention to Sayers’s conclusion. God is a creator, and thus, so are we. But it’s important to note that there’s one major difference between God’s creativity and our own. He creates from nothing while we require preexistent reality before we can create. God brought forth the universe from nothing, but the first act of human creativity in Genesis 2 is when God placed man in the garden with the beasts that he had created and then told Adam to name them all. The text says, “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19, emphasis added). It’s interesting to note that after creating the universe and after giving man the capacity for language, God then expectantly waited to see what names man would create for the animals in the world around him. Could it then also be true that God expectantly waits to see what each of us will create as a result of our response to him, his word, and his created world surrounding us?
• • •
These thoughts about the creative impulse were running through my mind at the same time I was working through the Psalms for a second time. Not being well versed in how to respond creatively, I began by writing some basic one-line responses to the text. These weren’t journal responses discussing my feelings about the text, lessons learned, or applications. They were just responses, often the first thing coming to mind after reading the text. The first psalm that I wrote anything for was Psalm 42, and I simply wrote the question, “Why do I allow my melancholy to overcome God’s mercies?” The next day after reading Psalm 43, I wrote a sort of prayer list that said, “That I would hope for God and praise him again. Eyes to see your work and hand in and behind the realities of the day. Your truth to enlighten my mind and enliven my heart.”
It wasn’t long, however, before my responses turned into short poem-like musings. One of the first was written in response to Psalm 55.
How can I cry for justice
When I long for mercy
How can I pray for enemies
Meet their just end
When I seek to live
In the house of God
I must love my enemy
as I love myself
I must cry for mercy
for them in their sin
Or I must embrace the
hand of God’s wrath
In my life and in theirs
For my heart of sin
Is brother to my enemies
This continued as I read through the book of Psalms each day, and I found a connection with the Word of God that I had not known in years … or maybe ever. Instead of reading a passage of Scripture and asking what I could get out of it, I allowed the material given by God—in this case, the Psalms—to filter through my mind and heart before considering a response. Devotional time, which had previously been a means to know more rationally about God, soon became a much more personal time.
I suppose this may seem very much like a subtle variation of journaling; however, I have done that in the past, and at least for me, this process was a different experience. My journals in the past were primarily centered on how I felt and thought about the text, focusing on some sort of application to my immediate circumstance. But as I wrote poems, I found two things to be quite different. First, these interactions were less focused on my experience and more focused on God and His work. It’s certainly true that my experience molded the words of the poems, but I found the poetry was a way of looking elsewhere, specifically to his throne. The second major difference was that, unlike a personal journal, when I wrote a poem, I was using a creative voice that I had rarely exercised in the past. I can’t help but think that in using this creative voice, God waited like he did for Adam in anticipation and was pleased with my creative product. I was taking what he had given me, namely his Word and my voice, and returned it to him with my own element of creativity attached to it. In fact, I think this may be what the psalmists mean when they urge us to sing a new song.
Until recently, however, I had assumed that the new songs to be sung were either the Psalms themselves or what those who are skilled at writing music and lyrics have penned for us to sing. From both sources, we have a rich tradition of worship songs to draw from, especially for those of us who are not so talented at composition. But I don’t think that the Lord only wants us to repeat the words of others; I think he’s pleased when we sing to him our new song. And while we might not have the insight or talent found in the historical and modern songwriters, their songs are not always our songs. It is this thought that George MacDonald echoes in Unspoken Sermons I: The New Name where he says, “This or that man may understand God more, may understand God better than he, but no other man can understand God as he understands him.” Essentially, MacDonald says that each of us has a unique way of understanding God that does not overlap with what others know of God. MacDonald continues,
There is a chamber also—(O God, humble and accept my speech)—a chamber in God Himself, into which none can enter but the one, the individual, the peculiar man,— out of which chamber that man has to bring revelation and strength for his brethren. That is that for which he was made—to reveal the secret things of the Father.
We were created by God to share our unique experience of God with others in the body of Christ.
Each of us has God-given creative talents that help us form and sing our own new songs. Some of us have the ability to write poetry, some to paint pictures or take photographs, and others to sculpt, tell stories, or write plays and essays. Each of us—yes, each and every one of us—has been given a unique voice with a unique creative language by which we sing a new song about God … to God and to others, which is our own form of creative worship. But only if we use these talents to respond to God’s Word and his world will our new songs help others come into the presence of the infinite. Thus, not only is our individual time of worship with its creative response enriching to ourselves, but others can also find their experience with God (and augment that experience) as we share our new songs with them.
However, the idea of sharing my experience with others brought with it fear. With so many talented artists in the world, so many talented preachers and expositors, I often doubt that anything I could say would be of benefit to others. Even more, as I think about my own creative impulse, I’m quickly burdened with the desire to produce something of excellence, which is often defined by comparison. For instance, when I played soccer, I always knew who the best player on the field was and knew I could never be him. When I was on stage, it was not difficult to identify the most talented individual, someone I rarely was. And when it comes to writing, I realize that the genius of the great authors is beyond my capacity. The reality is that I will most likely never be the best at anything. And it’s not just me. Most of us are (and will always be) average. That is the statistical nature of reality. But that should not stop any one of us from creating. The fact of the matter is that I think God expects us to respond creatively to him even if we are average. I don’t think we are supposed to compare our works and words with others. I think we’re supposed to sing our new song and allow the Lord to do the rest. It was two of Christ’s parables that helped me understand this fact.
The first is the story of the widow’s offering found in Mark and Luke’s gospel. Jesus, seeing a small offering given by a poor widow surrounded by rich people contributing large sums of money, said, “This poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on” (Luke 21:3–4). The Lord sees our offerings, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, in light of what it is, we have to give, not in comparison to the wealth of others. And so while Mozart, Rembrandt, Milton, Bernini, Shakespeare, Einstein, Faraday, Curie, Hawking, and others might be seen as masters in their fields, that is no guarantee that God values their offerings more highly than the poem written or picture drawn by any one of us. When we genuinely offer up to him a new song of worship out of our poverty, the Lord accepts it as a fragrant offering, acceptable and pleasing to Him. Of course, this doesn’t mean that what we offer is valued highly enough by human standards to be marketed and sold to the masses, but it does mean that our offering is highly valued by God’s standards, a valuation that is far more important than any human measure.
While the story of the widow’s mite helped me understand that God values all contributions, it is the parable of the talents in Matthew and Luke that compelled me to act. The parable of the talents tells of a rich man giving some servants various amounts of money before leaving on a journey. Upon his return, he finds that some of the servants had increased the wealth given to them by various percentages. With these servants, the master was pleased regardless of the percentage increase that they had achieved. But there was one servant who was so afraid of losing what had been entrusted to him that he had hidden the money in the ground. When the rich man returned, he gave back the exact amount of money that was given to him. But as you might remember, the rich man was not at all pleased with this fearful servant. The rich man took the money from the fearful servant, gave it to the one who had the greatest return, and then cast the fearful man out of his presence.
God does not merely hope that we take the talents he has given us and do something with them. He expects it. If our talents are as small as the widow’s mite, he wants them offered to him. If our talent is as world-renowned as Beethoven’s or Rembrandt’s, he wants it offered to him. But in either case, if we fearfully hold on to our talent and bury it so that no one receives a benefit, then we should know that God is displeased with us and it is possible that his wrath will be poured out on us at some point. I realize that these are hard words with strong implications, but I think that God is serious about his call on our lives. And if the Westminster Catechism is right that “man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever,” then part of what it means to glorify God is to sing his praises, the very thing that creating a new song is all about.
• • •
It is with these things in mind that I compiled this volume of poetry. It came as a result of my encounters with God while reading, meditating on, and praying through the Psalms. While reading these poems may be a devotional experience for some—and I hope it is—that was not my primary purpose in writing and compiling it. First of all, it was a record of my personal experience with God through his book of Psalms. This collection will always be to me something that it cannot be for others—a road map showing me glimpses of the path my life has taken. Even now when I reread some poems, I am reminded of the place I was and how much God has helped me since writing them. In others, I find that I am still struggling through the same battles, and in a few instances, I seem to have spiritually regressed. Thus, for me, this book will always be a personal collection in a way that others can and will never know.
Yet, even so, I don’t mean to say that others can’t learn from reading these poems. In fact, the second purpose for this compilation is that if others would someday read these poems, there might be a chance they could glimpse McDonald’s “chamber in God Himself” I have glimpsed. This does not mean that my insights are necessarily unique. In fact, it’s quite possible that many of these poems may reflect what others have already seen of God. And in many instances, others may be able to state what I have seen and felt in a much better way than I have. But—and this is the important point—these words came from my experience with God and are told through my own voice, and as such, they may help others know that they are not alone in their struggle through life. In Shadowlands, a movie about the life of C. S. Lewis with Joy Davidman, Lewis encounters one of his students on a train. In the course of the conversation, the student says, “We read to know we’re not alone.” In like manner, if somehow you read these poems and find that your experience with God, though unique to you, is like the experiences that others are having, then this book of poetry will have served its second purpose.
But as important as it might be to record my personal experiences with God and to share them so as to help others find comfort in their journeys, it’s the third purpose for this book that I think may be the most important. In the introduction to the first edition of George MacDonald’s book A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul, published in 1880, a book we now know as Diary of an Old Soul, MacDonald writes,
Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find
Against each worded page a white page set:—
This is the mirror of each friendly mind
Reflecting that. In this book we are met.
Make it, dear hearts, of worth to you indeed:—
Let your white page be ground, my print be seed,
Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed.
When the first edition of the book was initially printed, he had his poems written only on the left side page of the book, leaving the right side page blank. He did this to leave space for his readers to record any thoughtful responses they might have while reading his work. While I’m not expecting that you respond to my words, it is my hope that you might see in my work an example of how you might creatively respond to God’s Word.[1] Like me, you may be prompted to respond to Scripture through poetry as your new song of worship. But not all of us respond to God with a poetic voice. You might be a painter. Then consider placing your new song on a canvas. You might be a dancer. Then dance as David did before the Lord. You might sculpt, draw, write, or compose music. Form your new song in whatever medium best suits your voice.
I am convinced that each of us has a creative voice that speaks in the realm of the arts, but it is important to realize that creativity is not solely limited to the arts. Some extremely creative people are immersed in the study of mathematics, physics, biology, management, or economics. In fact, if we look carefully at Genesis 2:19, the first record of human creativity, we find it to be one of biology, a work in the realm of science, not the arts. As such, even though this current work focuses on a creative artistic response to God’s Word, we must not think that the arts are the sole gatekeepers of creativity. Nor must we think that the artistic creative voice is the only new song that we can sing to God.
However, if you choose to exercise your creative voice I would be remiss if I didn’t state one major caution. Given the world in which we live today where people elevate the personal experience beyond its proper status, we must remember that our creative voice is a response to God’s work, his Word, and the movement of his Spirit and his person. It is never a substitute for God’s Word, Spirit, or person. This isn’t to deny the importance of the many deeply moving and awe-inspiring works of art that have been created in response to the world around us with all of its pain, pleasures, beauty, and ugliness. Such works are necessary, and in many cases, they are divinely influenced acts of creativity which we need to heed. But when we approach God to hear his voice and form our new song in the context of personal spiritual growth, I believe we must start with the Word, work, and person of God. We must pray with George MacDonald, “Fill us with the words that proceed out of thy mouth.” And it is not just MacDonald who holds such a view. Even the artist Vincent van Gogh understood this in his early years. On May 19, 1877, he wrote his brother Theo and said,
For one’s own work, thoughts and observations are not enough, we need the comfort and blessing and guidance of a higher power, and that is something anyone who is at all serious and who longs to lift up his soul to the light is sure to recognize and experience. Pining for God works like leaven on dough. May it also prove to be true in the story of both our lives.
Immersion in the Word—and the ensuing study, meditation, and prayer—prepares our voices of worship so that we can respond in a pleasing manner to God. God waits to hear how we’ll respond to what he has provided. His living Word makes dead men live again to sing his praise. I would encourage you to allow the Spirit to free your creative voice as you respond to his Word with a new song of worship that can only come from you.
[1] If you would like to read others’ poetic responses to the Psalms, I recommend the twenty-one sonnets of Anne Lock, written as a meditation on Psalm 51 in the 1500s. References to her work can be found in the bibliography.