The Song Nobody Wanted

In 1984, Leonard Cohen finished a song that had consumed him for nearly five years. He had filled notebook after notebook with draft verses — by some accounts, more than eighty — searching for the right words to capture something sacred and broken all at once. The song was Hallelujah.

When he finally delivered the album to Columbia Records, the label refused to release it in the United States. They didn't hear what Cohen heard. The song drifted into obscurity, a quiet track on an overlooked album by an aging poet most people had forgotten.

Cohen waited. He kept singing it in small concert halls. A decade passed before John Cale recorded a spare piano version. Then Jeff Buckley reimagined it with that aching, transcendent vocal. Then came Shrek, and choir arrangements, and a hundred other covers. Today Hallelujah is one of the most performed songs in the world.

But here is what strikes me: Cohen spent five years writing it, and then another decade watching it be ignored. Fifteen years between the first scribbled verse and the moment the world finally listened.

The Apostle James writes, "Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." The Almighty does not waste our seasons of waiting. Sometimes the song He is composing in your life simply has not found its audience yet. Keep singing. The hallelujah is coming.