The Editor of Our Faith

Ira Glass said something in his commencement speech to the Columbia J-School that I loved. He said editors don’t get the respect they deserve. (I’m certainly not an unbiased observer here.)

There are so many awards for reporters. Where are the awards for editors? There are so many famous reporters. So few famous editors. I believe that gifted editors are rarer than talented reporters.

As an editor myself, I empathize.

Certainly, writing a story takes creativity, commitment, and a lot of work. But the writing of a story is only half the battle. Editing is absolutely crucial.

Editing is what makes a story go from fine to fantastic. Deep editing involves a line edit, which is the encompassing project of reading a story for the flow, for the arc of characters and storylines, for overall coherence, for the feel and structure of a narrative. An editor’s job here is to make sure the story’s intended theme and thesis get across in a way that is comprehensible and compelling.

Then there’s the copyedit, which is more about making sure everything is clear. Choosing the right words. Ordering paragraphs and ideas, cutting and adding to give a story the boost from basic to unbelievable. This is about ensuring clarity and consistency.

And lastly is the proofread. This is the process of editing the nitty-gritty: commas and spelling errors and what not. Here the editor is just making sure there are no stumbling blocks, that there is no bumbling.

Anyway, nearly every good story you’ve read has an editor—or, more likely, many editors. Lots of eyes on the pages. The first writing was followed by a lot of rewriting.

And you won’t see the editors name on a work very often, but they have a huge task before them, responsible for making a work the best it can be.

Biblically, we know that God is the “author of our faith.”

It is God who is sovereign, who writes out the story of salvation and personal sanctification.

To one degree or another, all Christians can agree that God is the author of faith because the Bible tells us he is (Hebrews 12)—and because we know we didn’t write the script of the cosmos.

And yet, so often we mortals long to be our own editors. We want to say, “Okay, God, that’s a decent first draft, but hand over the manuscript of my life and let me really add some action!”

When we become the editor of our faith, we fail to fulfill the most basic function of an editor, which is to make the story better.

Our natural tendency is to make the story poorer, even when we feel we’re turning a drab drama into a thriller. We have a way of turning God’s amazing stories into mediocre ones—or worse. That’s what we did in the Fall.

We took the red pen and wrote a whole new story.

Glass said:

The entire process of making the story is convincing the story to not be what it wants to be, which is BAD. And turning it from the bad thing it’s trying to be, where the sources are inarticulate, and you don’t know how to structure it, and the structure you make doesn’t work, into the shining gleaming jewel that you have in your heart … that is editing!

So let us be obedient, helpful, loving protagonists. And even as God is the author, let him also be the editor of our faith.