A friend introduced me to Andrew Peterson's music a few years ago. Since then, I have hit "repeat" on my MP3 player again and again as I've been blessed by Andrew's thoughtful lyrics and gentle prose. I took my whole office to hear his BEHOLD THE LAMB Christmas concert. Just as the concert was beginning, I had the panic moment: This is our office outing for the holiday, and I've made the boss' decision that everyone will attend this musical. What if they don't like it?

Not to worry. Andrew and his crew (including favorites Sandra McCracken, Jill Phillips and Derek Webb) accompanied our hearts to the heart of God. I wept more than once as Andrew sang about our King. My colleagues fell in love with Andrew's gift, too. In fact, one of our "less emotional" men told me he teared up a few times himself. It's not too late to add Andrew's BEHOLD THE LAMB CD to your Christmas music tradition (I am receiving no royalties for this plug!). Here is the link to Andrew's site: www.andrew-peterson.com

To get a taste of his beautiful work, here is a bit from Andrew's latest journal entry: The ache is there again. Deep in the pit of my stomach, like a magic door standing in a field—a door that you can walk around, only when you open it you see not the field on other side of the door but a starry depth, dizzying and windless. It feels like that door was opened in my soul, a link to eternity that I’m not yet ready to enter, though I was made for nothing else. I feel that tiny opening and it is fear and joy and pain and peace all in the same moment, like my emotion has no adequate language to express exactly what it is, so it pokes at the sore spot and informs me that something’s there, and whatever it is it isn’t good. But it isn’t bad either. It’s different and dangerous.

I feel that way often, but most especially after a big fun show like tonight. It’s such a satisfying evening, the culmination of so much work, an experience that, if you were to have told me when I was young and learning to play music that I’d be doing it, I wouldn’t have believed you (though I’d have wanted to). Tonight while we were playing and it was feeling so good, I noticed Ben at the piano, earnestly pounding a certain combination of chords, and there was something wonderful about the way he was spelling out the music, like a poet reading his favorite verse or a flock of geese in formation. I was thinking about how remarkable it is that for as long as I can remember I’ve found pleasure in those braids of notes we call music, and there I was surrounded not just by musicians of great caliber but by comrades I’ve traveled with for years and with whom I’ve shared much more than just music. There was some kind of perfection in it, some kind of symmetry between the spiritual and the physical, the eternal and the temporal, and a big silly grin broke over my face.

It’s so much like the birth of Jesus. The Word became flesh, the eternal was thrust upon the temporal and submitted itself to the forward march of history. Music is only music when it’s moving forward, changing, when the melody whooshes from season to season. The idea of the song was formed, but it was only a real song when it was bound to meter and rhythm and melody—in its submission it expressed the greater truth of its nature. It changed from being a dream to being a story. It is something that is actually happening. The Word became flesh.

I will keep telling that story as long as I am able. Because the ache, that pinch of dissatisfaction that haunts these fine moments, compels me. As much as I fret over it, that magic door in the prairie opens on my finest dream and my sweetest home. That starry deep beyond the door is the temple of God and every day I come closer to standing there on the edge, closing my eyes and tumbling in. Maybe when I’m an old man my eyes will have adjusted enough that I can peer in and see the Great City, all spires and lamp lit windows and green tussocks of new grass, but for now it is enough to know that the door is there, and that love fills the space beyond it.

I can’t get to sleep.

AP