I Need An Editor!

Sometimes it’s hard to believe that life is actually going somewhere.

One of my faith struggles is trusting that God is actually at work in and behind and between my experiences, redeeming my poor choices and silly mistakes, while honoring my freedom to make my own decisions.

I am writing my own story, but I also recognize my need for an editor. Someone who can make sense of this incoherent mess of a first draft I’m turning in. Because that’s exactly how life gets lived. We are all writers frantically pounding out a messy first draft on our keyboards, while an unforgiving deadline looms over us.

Unlike writers, we don’t have the luxury of going back and cleaning up the first draft of our lives. We can’t edit the last day we lived like a writer can edit the last paragraph she wrote. All we can do is keep on living, moving forward, filling page after page with false starts, wrong turns, dead ends, faulty logic, weak structure, and awkward dialogue.

When our deadline arrives, we turn in our story. It’s not much, but it’s the best we could do with the time we were given.

What our first draft needs is an editor who understands the story we were trying to tell and who understands our limitations as writers.

We need an editor who can tidy up the messy details without losing sight of the larger story we envisioned in our heads, but failed to translate to the page.

An editor who sees the best parts of our story and draws them out, highlighting them in bold type, while weaving the unfortunate, unwise, and underdeveloped threads into a coherent subplot.

An editor who can take our story and make it better than we ever imagined without changing its essence so much that it ceases to be our story.

That’s the kind of editor I need for my life.

Any ideas where I might find one?