Known and Loved
On the Ministry of Unfinished Things
Somewhere around the end of 2017 I started collecting thoughts for a book that I wanted to write. I have a note in my phone that dates back to early 2018 with the very beginning of an outline, as well as some photos on my phone from the early spring of that year with some basic ideas I had started to put on the whiteboard in my old office. I had a title and a big idea. The book would be called Known and Loved, because I was fascinated by the idea that this is what most of us human beings feel we are designed for. We want to be known by the people around us - not all of them, but some of them for sure - and we want to be loved by them for who we are, as we are. And while we are wanting to be known and loved, we are also made for knowing and loving others around us. This seems to be hard-wired into our human design, and, if I could be so bold, I wanted to suggest that this desire to be known and loved, and to know and love in response, was gifted to us by a God who wants the very same thing. He wants to know and love us, and he wants to be known and loved in return.
I started carving out some time in the afternoons to work on writing. I would sit at my desk with my notebook and handwrite a couple of pages that I would then type into a document. Some days the writing seemed to flow almost effortlessly. Other days it was as painful as walking downstairs after a heavy back squat workout. Which, if you’ve never experienced, is a pretty painful thing. But I digress. I chipped away at the writing even as I felt the walls of my inner world crumbling around me. I wrote, and re-wrote, and edited, and cried in frustration some afternoons. And then I stopped. I don’t know when I put my pen down the last time, but I have a little mark in my notebook that tells me I was 15,829 words into the project when I did. I was in the middle of a paragraph. There were still words to be attached to that particular idea. There was more to follow in that chapter. I have the notes that tell me what I was supposed to write about in the next chapter and the ones that come after that, but I’ve only written maybe another seven hundred words after that. If I were to think about writing a 200 page book, I’d need to write another at least another 45,000 words.
This isn’t my only unfinished writing project, either. There are other ideas written down in notebooks that I’ve long forgotten. There are partial manuscripts in notebooks in my office, and in other notebooks at home. I guess you could say I have a collection of unfinished things. This often feels a bit embarrassing to me when I admit it, because it feels like a deficiency of sorts - a character flaw on my part; an indication that I don’t have the persistence to stick with something difficult and see it through to the end. And this may be at least partially true.
The completed works, the neatly ordered lines on a printed page, the finished products appeal to us by their apparent perfection. We buy finished products. We finish our basement remodels (well I don’t, but you do). We read finished books. We watch finished films. We buy finished furniture for our living rooms. That is, unless you like going to Ikea and shopping for unfinished furniture and trying to decipher exactly what those diagrams in the instructions mean, in which case, I’m sure you’re a lovely person, but we might have to part company here.
But I wonder if there is a deep and rich resonance in the unfinished things too. If you could sit with me for a few moments and we could talk about the handwritten pages in my notebook, or if I could sit with you and talk through some of the unfinished things in your life, I wonder if we might not appreciate the humanness of that as well. I wonder if we might find comfort for and from one another in the ministry of unfinished things because at the end of the day we are all of us unfinished things. We have all read, or heard, often enough that on the seventh day God rested from his work of creation, and yet here we are moving through spring again towards summer while the flowers bloom, and the grass gets greener, and the leaves unfold their hands towards heaven in wordless worship and we find that in many ways, the work of creation is just as unfinished as it ever was. There will be a season of fruitfulness in the months ahead, and then just as certainly will follow a season in which it will appear that absolutely nothing will ever live again. The trees will sleep the sleep of the dead and the grass will wither, and the flowers will fade, and we will witness the wonder of a winter of unfinished things waiting to be resumed again on the other side.
It seems to me that unfinished things carry a certain and peculiar beauty because they remind us that the only time we are ever really finished is when we are really finished. And while we might be looking forward to that day, and some of us are closer to it than others, the truth is that while we are yet unfinished, it means there is still hope for new beauty to be created from us, and by us, and maybe with us and for us too.
I have an unfinished manuscript sitting on my desk today. There are another 45,000 words still to be written before it’s completed. Maybe there are more or less than that. Maybe some of the words that I thought would have gone in certain places will change by the time I get there. Maybe some of them won’t even be there at all. Maybe I will put all of the words together in my notebook, type them into that document on my computer, and when I finish the project I’ll decide to let other people read them. And maybe I will just keep the words to myself, not because I want to be selfish with them, but because maybe all it was ever about was me writing my way through my own attempts to know and be known, to love and be loved.
The unfinished manuscript is giving me some hope today, though. It witnesses to the deep and poignant beauty to be found in this moment of my yet unfinished life. Some day I will be finished. It will probably happen midway through some paragraph that I will feel is particularly important, but the one who is writing my story will decide that the manuscript has ended. But until then, I’m going to enjoy the unfinished place, in hopes that there is more to follow.
still
be stripped bare and to the soul and bone the branches of my tree naked for you to see their stark and knotted ways that against a pale blue sky still stare sparing no loneliness bearing no leaves barely breathing still wait, still.