Words. They are important to me. I’m sure I’m not the only writer who feels the need for full stops and commas to be in all the right places when sending a ‘quick text.’
Honestly, I drive my family mad. And just to note, my husband has now banned me from watching him when he’s writing an email. He reckons I’m too annoying when I’m pulling stupid faces and making silly noises at the back of him when he’s making mistakes in his typing.
Bob Goff once said, “God isn’t an editor, He’s a creator. He’s not looking for the typos in our lives; He sees the beauty in them.” As I read it, I wondered if that’s how I was living out my faith. Was I looking for the beauty in the ashes, or was I focusing on every grammatical mistake and typo that seemed to run throughout my life story? Was I telling God that I’ll only step out in faith and be obedient to Him when every word and every line in my life is edited and perfect?
Perhaps.
Then I realised something. God isn’t proofreading our stories; He’s not scanning our life pages for all the mistakes we’ve made and are making. He’s not standing at the back of us pulling silly faces and rolling His eyes because all our unedited shortcomings and failures need to be deleted. Sure, He wants us to learn from our mistakes and mishaps, but if we see them as typos in this script called ‘life’ that litter our faith like wedding confetti on a church lawn, then we’ve got God all wrong.
God thinks differently about our lives, He sees the beauty in them. Hebrews 12:2 reminds us that, Jesus is, ‘the author and the finisher of our faith.’ In other words, God will craft each paragraph, each sentence, and each word of our lives to fit into His greater plan because He’s a creator and not an editor.
God can take even the most jumbled-up letters of your life and turn them into a beautifully crafted story that brings Him all the Glory. And while we’re busy comparing and worrying whether we have our prayers and faith grammatically correct, God is gently persuading us to show our unedited lives to people who need to know He loves them, regardless of their mistakes. He wants to shine His perfect love through each one of their imperfect stories, page after glorious page.
What moves God isn’t perfect faith but faith that still trusts Him, even in the messiness and typos of our everyday lives.
Meaningless, religious jargon that only reaches as far as the ceiling, doesn’t move God to compassion. We need to see the value in our messed-up stories and present our authentic, imperfect selves to God. We need to spend less time hustling for our worthiness, as Brené Brown suggests, trying to win people over with our edited, polished faith, and just be authentic.
It’s a challenge, I know, and this social media-driven world forever tells us our life stories have to be edited and polished before they are published causing us to rely on ourselves and not God. The false belief that our typos and mistakes need to be erased before we even think about being a good, Christian witness to other people is a pressure that I can do without, thank you very much.
Let me remind you, dear reader, that JESUS is the AUTHOR and FINISHER of our faith.
God is a creator, not an editor. He delights in reading our stories. He takes great pleasure in documenting our lives chapter by beautiful un-edited and unpolished chapter. He doesn’t wince when there is a typo or grammatical error as we journey on through our book of life. Every big mistake doesn’t strike you out of His grace and love.
No, He sees beauty in your brokenness, and He reminds each one of us that He is a creator and not an editor, an author and a finisher of our faith because He loves us so.
Wendy xo
Thank you so much, Wendy, for explaining it like this. So relatable and helpful.