BackstageI have started to make a kind of peace with a hard fact: some of what I am writing now, I will never hear sung.
Not because the songs are bad. Because there are too many of them, and a life is short, and a song has to travel a long, slow road from the page to a voice to a room full of people who know it well enough to lift it without thinking. That road takes years. It takes a recording, and a sharing, and a stranger deciding it belongs to them, and then that stranger teaching it to someone else. And I am, at a certain point, simply going to run out of years before some of these songs run out of road. They will be sung after me, by people who never knew there was a me, in rooms I will never walk into.
For a long time I found that genuinely unbearable. It felt like planting a garden I would never see bloom — worse, like being told in advance that I would die between the sowing and the flowering, and that the harvest, when it came, would belong to strangers who would never know whose hands had put the seed in the ground. Why write it, then? Why pour the care of a whole life into songs whose best moment I have already been told I will miss?
And then I went back and read, slowly, the long roll call of the faithful in the letter to the Hebrews, and it rearranged me.
They died still holding the promise
The writer of that letter does something remarkable. He lists them one after another — the people who trusted Yahuah across generations — and he is honest about how their stories ended. He says these all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them from a distance and welcomed them, and having admitted that they were strangers and travelers on the earth.
Sit with that sentence, because it is not the triumphant thing we usually make of these names. They died not having received the promise. The thing they had staked their whole lives on did not arrive inside their lifetime. Abraham was told his descendants would be a nation and a blessing to the whole world, and he died owning a single field with a grave in it. Moses led a people forty years toward a land and then climbed a mountain at the end, and Yahuah showed him the whole country spread out — and told him he would not cross into it. He saw it from a distance. He welcomed it. And he died on the wrong side of the river.
These were not failures. The letter holds them up as the very definition of faith. And what made them faithful was precisely this: they kept building toward a thing they had already been told they would not live to see finished. They planted for a room they would never enter. They sang, if you like, for singers who were not born yet.
The harvest was never meant to be yours to hold
There is a line a little further on in that same passage that undid me completely. The writer says of all these faithful ones that they did not receive what was promised, because Yahuah had planned something better — that they, without us, should not be made complete.
Read that again. They, without us, should not be made complete. The promise was deliberately built so large that it could not be finished inside any single life. It needed the generations. It was designed as a relay from the start — each runner carrying the thing forward as far as their own legs would take them, and then handing it, still unfinished, to a runner they would never meet. The people in that list were not cheated out of the finish line. They were doing exactly what the race required. The completion was always going to belong to everyone at once, across all the years, or it would not have been worth completing.
And that turned my grief inside out. I had been thinking of my unsung songs as a private loss — my flowers, blooming for strangers, after I was gone. But that is the wrong picture entirely. I am not a gardener cheated of my harvest. I am one runner in a relay that has been going for thousands of years, and the whole dignity of my leg of it is that I run it faithfully and then hand the songs forward without needing to see where they land.
Faithfulness is measured at your end, not at the finish
This has changed how I write, quietly but completely.
I used to write, without quite admitting it, for the applause I could witness. I wanted to be in the room. I wanted to see the song land, to watch the face soften, to have the harvest confirmed in front of me while I was still there to enjoy it. And there is nothing wrong with the joy of a song landing — Yahuah is generous, and sometimes He lets us see it. But when that becomes the reason, the work shrinks to the size of my own lifespan. I only plant what I can watch bloom. And a life that only plants what it can personally harvest is a small life, however busy it looks.
The people in that roll call were free of that, and their freedom is the thing I want. They were faithful at their own end of the relay and left the finish line to Yahuah. They planted, and blessed the seed, and died, and trusted the God who does not lose track of a single true thing across a hundred generations. Their reward was not the harvest. Their reward was the faithfulness itself — and the God who keeps it.
You are not cheated when you build something whose completion you will not live to see. You are trusted with a leg of a race far longer than one life.
So if you are pouring yourself into something you already suspect you will not see finished — a child you are raising for a world you won't live in, a work whose fruit is decades out, a prayer for a person who will not turn for another generation, a whole faithful life whose harvest is on the far side of your own death — do not let anyone tell you that is a waste. It is the most ancient and honored shape a faithful life can take. You are in the roll call now, running your leg, planting your field, writing your unsung songs for a room you will never enter.
Run it well to your own end. Hand it forward with an open hand. And trust that the God who planned it so that no one is made complete alone is keeping every unheard note — to be sung, at last, in a room where you may not be standing, but where you will most certainly, at the end of all things, be counted.
