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It’s a question that has plagued artists since art-making began. When is a work finished? When do you lay down the paintbrush, or the take your hands from the clay, or let the last note reverberate into the empty air?

Perhaps the question itself is wrong-headed. Perhaps the question isn’t about when a piece of pottery has gone through enough glazing, a spiritual formation article has gone through enough editing. Perhaps we only begin truly to create art when we let that poem or photograph or concerto meet a soul other than our own. Perhaps the reason artists struggle with knowing when artwork is finished is because that’s when it actually begins, when control is finally wrested from our hands and placed squarely in those of our viewers, readers, listeners, audience members.

In The Gift of Asher Lev, his breath-taking follow up to My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok writes, “Art begins. . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.”

This is an act of surrender for the artist, a submission to the reality that creativity is not something designed for our benefit alone. When God created the heavens and the Earth, God also created those meant to appreciate that beauty—Adam and Eve. The Garden of Eden translates directly from the Hebrew as the Garden of Delight, an indication that God made the beautiful to be experienced, reveled in, loved. Creative work of any kind is an act of love, one that is meant to be experienced in community, not isolation.

But just like God’s release of humanity into the Garden (and the eventual Fall), artists have no promise that audiences will receive their gifts as they intended. It in wholly incredible and holy sacrifice that God chose to allow humans the vast and destructive power to chose. If the act of creation didn’t work out (at least in the first act) for our Father, what makes us think it will work out well for us?

To create and release that creation necessitates a trust in something greater than ourselves—a trust in the one who makes all things beautiful in their time. This choice to relinquish our art-making, to say something is finished, is to lay down our desires, interpretations, all of the life that went into the creation of that work for the sake of others. It is an act that parallels what St. Matthew writes in his gospel: “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.”Matthew 16:25. All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Which isn’t to say that anyone creating something (a pot of soup, a child’s playground) has an excuse to rush through it in order to release it into the hands of others. Many a bad article, shoddy painting, or ill-timed thought has been sent—unlovingly—out into the world because of the deadline is here; the platform begs to be climbed upon; the button on that blog post screams: PUBLISH.

Still, to follow in the steps of our creative Creator God is to practice the art of letting go.

This is an art that I’m still learning.

As you read in the Front Page written by my colleague and friend, Joannah Sadler, there is something beautiful in unfinished work. We live in the tension of the already and the not yet. She articulated so clearly the invitation of what is unfinished that I felt hope wash over my soul. Ironically, neither of us knew we’d be writing about the act of finishing, each of us from a different end.

It is evidence of God’s goodness and provision that neither did we know that we were writing these pieces as bookends to the last print version of Conversations Journal. In some important ways, the work that we do and have done at the journal feels unfinished; the need for discussion of spiritual formation and spiritual formation resources in our time still keen. In others, Christ has been kind in making clear to us both that it is time to let go, to make space, to allow what is to come next to be birthed out of community in order to flourish.

The hope and the heartache of this letting go are both beyond words. What is to come is unclear. But we have confidence in the redemptive work of our God. A promise that, as it says in Ecclesiastes 3:11, he has made everything beautiful in its time. The verse goes on to say that no one can find out what God does from beginning to end. That, too, is a promise. Because as we let go—of our creative works, this journal, our very lives—we cannot yet imagine or see the goodness that God will bring about in the right season.