Eighty Verses and a Wastebasket

Leonard Cohen spent nearly five years writing Hallelujah. He drafted somewhere around eighty verses, filling notebook after notebook, sitting on the floor of his hotel room in his underwear, banging his head against the carpet in frustration. When he finally finished the song and released it in 1984, his record label refused to promote the album. Critics shrugged. The world moved on.

It took another decade before John Cale recorded a spare, haunting cover. Then Jeff Buckley reimagined it again. Slowly, over years, the song found its audience. Today it is considered one of the greatest songs ever written — a hymn that has been sung at weddings, funerals, and everything between.

But here is what strikes me: Cohen could have stopped at verse fifteen. He could have settled for something good enough. Instead, he sat with the work. He trusted the process even when it felt like the carpet beneath his forehead.

The Psalmist writes, "Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord" (Psalm 27:14). That waiting is not passive. It is the active, difficult, sometimes agonizing discipline of staying with what God is shaping in you — even when the world has not yet caught up.

Some of the most beautiful things the Almighty is doing in your life right now will not be recognized for years. Keep writing the verse. Stay on the floor. The hallelujah is coming.