Leave Room for God
Sometimes the most important item on the agenda is having no agenda.
Before he became a household name for Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda had another hit Broadway musical, In the Heights.
It was not easy. He worked for seven years to bring In the Heights to Broadway before he took a real break.
When he finally went on vacation after working so long, he happened to pick up Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton. Initially, this was leisure reading at a resort, not research for his next musical.
In The Way of Excellence, Brad Stulberg quotes Miranda, who explains what happened next:
“The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, Hamilton walked into it. It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life—perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life—came to me on vacation.”
Reflecting on the creative process, Miranda explains, “The good idea comes in the moment of rest. It comes in the shower. It comes when you’re doodling or playing trains with your son. It’s when your mind is on the other side of things.”
This has many parallels with the spiritual life.
Grace is a gift. We neither earn it nor control it. Still, there is much we can do to make it easier for God to find us—or for us to find God.
As Miranda puts it, “A good idea doesn’t come when you’re doing a million things.”
Our God seems to work the same way. He shows up when we finally stop, when there’s finally room for him to walk in.