To My Friend Drew.

On rejection and the call to faithfulness.

Drew,

I wanted to write to you to say I’m sorry. Rejection is never easy. To write and have someone say, “That isn’t what we want,” or “That isn’t good enough,” or “This won’t fit with our audience,” feels so personal. Writing is such a personal thing. You take your heart off your sleeve and put it on the internet for widespread consumption, you hope, but often what you get is specific and personal rejection.

To write requires honesty, and honesty demands courage. To risk being heard means you risk being ignored. That is the prophetic call of the church to be Jeremiah to write and weep and speak to a people who will not listen. The words we write and the words we speak have power because they are simple acts of sub-creation. These words we write are building a beautiful world using the stuff of earth created by words.

Tolkien, like every writer, struggled with doubt and fear and wonder of significance and acceptance. It was a dream that cured him of his anxiety and fear of rejection. That dream became Leaf by Niggle, a short story Tolkien wrote down upon waking. Niggle was a perfectionist; he was a hardworking man who was kind but grew frustrated by life's interruptions. Niggle spends all his free time working meticulously on a life-sized painting of a majestic tree. But he rarely makes much progress.

A large storm hit, and his neighbor, Mr. Parish, had his house damaged. The rain came in, and his wife fell ill. Niggle leaves his unfinished painting with perfect little leaves and rides his bike to town to get help for his neighbor’s wife. In the process of saving her, he becomes sick and dies.

When he is on his journey through the afterlife, he comes across a tree. His tree. Not just the leaves that he painted, although they were there, but also the ones he had only thought of, and even a few he had yet to conceive. It was perfect. It was a gift.

In the process of perfecting our art. It is God, the great artist, who is using our art to perfect us. It is the disappointments, sorrows, anxieties, and rejections that make our leaves more beautiful. The art of your gift of writing is for the world, but it’s really for you. God is using the same words that made the world to recreate yours. The fussy, nervous Niggle saw that his art was for him; it was a tool of God to sanctify him. To make him more like the kind of person who naturally does what Jesus does. It made him the kind of person who can speak for God because he’d been broken by God.

The kind of people who speak for God Drew are those who have been blessed, those who have been broken, and those who have been given to a world starving for beauty and truth.

Rejection as a writer is refinement. It is a path to become like Christ so you can speak for Christ. Luke tells us that ^“For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.”

We are called to be faithful to what God has called us to do. We are called to become like Christ, and that includes rejection. It doesn’t make it easier when it comes, but knowing that no word we write, no path we walk is ever wasted. Gives us hope that we will one day see the tree that we have created imperfectly in our words, more perfectly in our minds, in full, perfect display as our gift to the world, as it is made new and given back to us in radiant perfection that could only have been made flawless by a God who speaks.

God is making you, Drew, into the kind of writer who is more dependent on him than you could ever imagine. But it isn’t a short path. There will be victories, and there will be more rejection on this path; this is, as our friend Eugene says, a long obedience in the same direction.

Listen to your life, Drew. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.