From Ruins to the Hallelujah Chorus

By 1741, George Frideric Handel was a ruined man. A stroke had left his right arm temporarily paralyzed. His operas had flopped across London. Creditors circled. At fifty-six years old, the once-celebrated composer was broke, broken, and seriously considering retirement. Most people who knew him assumed his best work was behind him.

Then a librettist named Charles Jennens handed Handel a collection of scripture passages stitched together into a single narrative — the story of the Messiah, from prophecy to resurrection. Something ignited in the aging composer. He locked himself in his room on Brook Street and began to write. For roughly twenty-four days, he barely ate or slept. Music poured out of him like water from a cracked dam. When his servant found him after completing the "Hallelujah Chorus," Handel was weeping. "I did think I did see all Heaven before me," he said, "and the great God Himself."

The work that emerged from that small London room — Messiah — has been performed every year for nearly three centuries. It came not from Handel's season of strength, but from his season of ruin.

This is how the Almighty works. He does not wait for us to have it all together. He meets us in our emptiest rooms, in the seasons when we are most certain that nothing good can come from us again. And there, in the ruins, He composes something eternal.

Your worst chapter is not your last chapter. It may be exactly where God begins His greatest work.