There is a Crack in Everything

I once got the idea to write my wife a series of texts throughout the day to show her how much I loved and appreciated her. I started by stealing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's line "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." Then, every hour or so throughout the day I sent her texts that listed all the things I loved about her. Not the most original idea, I know, but it was just a whim of mine that I thought she might enjoy. I decided the way to really show her how much I loved her was to list all the little idiosyncrasies that I adore about her. Just the funny little things, unique to only her, that someone who didn't know her as well as me might never notice. All day long I sent them to her, and all day long I patted myself on the back thinking what a romantic genius I was. When I got home, I found her a little bit upset. How could she possibly be upset when she was married to a Casanova like me? I wondered. She handed me her phone and let me read through the texts. It read like a long, detailed list of all her flaws and shortcomings. Though I certainly didn't mean it that way, I couldn't deny that was exactly how it sounded.

In his song "Anthem", Leonard Cohen sings,

Leonard Cohen

"Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in."

I suppose that's what I was trying to say to my wife in my misbegotten texts: It's her perfect little "flaws" that I love so much about her; that they aren't really flaws at all to me. 

Despite my good intentions, my attempt to woo my wife through my texts was an absolute failure. However, Cohen's lyrics remind us all that we need to accept our creative failures. It's through our "cracks" that we get the opportunity to progress and grow. It's through the very things we consider to be our weaknesses, Cohen tells us, that we gain enlightenment.

In a recent article in the L.D.S. magazine, Ensign, Wendy Ulrich echos Cohen's idea. She writes, "...it is crucial to understand that while sin inevitably leads us away from God, weakness, ironically, can lead us toward Him." Just as Cohen's cracks allow the light to get in, so too do our weaknesses allow God to enlighten us.

Why wouldn't this idea also apply to our creative weaknesses? Of course, how we respond to our weaknesses makes all the difference. Later in the Ensign article, Ulrich explains, "...we also do not grow spiritually unless we accept our state of human weakness, respond to it with humility and faith, and learn through our weakness to trust in God." I feel that you can very easily replace the word "spiritually" in this sentence with "creatively" or "artistically" and it would still hold true. In other words, if we will respond to our creative weaknesses with humility and faith, they will teach us to trust in God. By trusting in God, we will create the work that He always intended us to create. After all, "the Lord has more in mind for [us] than [we] have in mind for [ourselves]." (-Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles).