The Song That Took Five Years to Finish

Leonard Cohen once confessed that writing Hallelujah nearly broke him. He drafted roughly eighty verses over the course of five years, filling notebook after notebook, pacing hotel rooms in his underwear, banging his head against the floor in frustration. When he finally finished the song in 1984, his record label refused to release the album in the United States. They didn't think it was commercial enough.

For over a decade, Hallelujah drifted in obscurity. It took John Cale's spare cover in 1991, and then Jeff Buckley's haunting version in 1994, before the world began to hear what Cohen had labored so long to say. Today it is considered one of the greatest songs ever written — a song that would not exist if its author had quit after the first year, or the second, or the fourth.

The Apostle James writes, "Let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing." That word "perfect" doesn't mean flawless. It means finished — brought to fullness.

So often we want to abandon the work God is doing in us because the process feels too slow, too painful, too hidden. But the Almighty is not in a hurry. He is composing something in your life that requires every verse, even the ones no one else will ever see. Don't quit before the song is finished.