No. 006: Holy Cow! (In Defense of a Mistake).
On proofreading, perfectionism, and the gift of weakness.
Who watches the watchmen? I am only several posts into this Substack, and already the project has been a sorely humbling experience.
I have earned a paycheck as a proofreader and an editor for over a decade. In this time I have received the privilege of being one of the first people to read through many prominent Evangelical academic new releases—the ones that get all the Twitter buzz among my husband’s seminarian circles—and I have been honored to play a role in helping them to land on their final form before publication.
My academic background is in biblical studies, not in English or graphic design or communications, but I was afforded entrance onto a career path in publications on the merit that my curriculum vitae documented several years of experience perfecting the publications and presentations of various esteemed college professors. In high school, I was the editor of the school newspaper, and I recall setting entire first-draft articles by other students ablaze with my scarlet Stabilo Fineliner while wearing my argyle cardigan, matching wool skirt, and knee-high socks from J. Crew—and a little, self-satisfied grin upon my angular, freckled face.
I feel great joy and satisfaction in pointing out to authors that their restrictive clauses need to begin with “that” rather than “which;” and that they mustn’t split their infinitives; and that they are “going for the jugular,” not the “juggler,” of their opponent’s argument; and that they have just subconsciously quoted a turn of phrase from The Fellowship of the Ring nearly verbatim; and that their chapter theologizing on the lusts of human flesh begins on quite the conspicuous double-digit page number…
I mean this only as a testament to my years of experience and practice, not as evidence of some inherent genius, but when it comes to matters of syntax, semantics, spelling, typography, and punctuation, I know what I am doing. Whenever I proofread a book, I take it slowly—word by word, sentence by sentence. And once I have read through the book entirely, I always scan back through for any mistakes I might have missed. I wholeheartedly desire to serve the authors whose work I proofread well by attending thoroughly to the details of their writing. And, of course, I care about my professional reputation as a dependable proofreader.
But, my friends… I do make mistakes.
I recently bought a copy of a book that I proofread last year. I rarely buy books that I have worked on, but this was one that had changed my life to read and one about whose message and success I cared deeply. A few minutes into rereading it, I drew my palms to my temples and exhaled an audible sigh of exasperation when I found that I had left an accidentally-repeated word stuck in the middle of a sentence.
Another time, I proofread a brilliant academic manuscript by a well-reputed scholar. In the end, I felt confident about my work. But months later, my husband drew my attention to a Twitter post that, to my horror, pictured a place in the book where the author was supposed to be talking about the Agnus Dei (the Lamb of God), but the final, printed text actually read “Angus Dei” (yeah… Holy Cow!).
As it turns out, it is even more difficult to proofread one’s own work. When your brain already knows what you are supposed to have written, it subconsciously loosens its reins on the eyes’ diligence to scour the text for mistakes, even if you have mentally convinced yourself that you are training them sharply on each word.
If you have been receiving my Substack posts in your email inbox—rather than reading them on a web browser a little while after I have posted them and after I have had time to scramble back to the dashboard to fix whatever mistakes I later notice—you have likely observed that they have not been perfect. Missing words, misspelled words, repeated words, out-of-order words, root words where there should be inflected words…
I do not write under the influence of anything other than black coffee and ice water and, well, whatever it is that a full day of homeschooling one’s children does to the brain. But despite my well-established professional command of the English language, and despite the fact that I always read through my posts word-for-word several times before pressing “send,” there are always mistakes.
I am a born and bred perfectionist. One of my two sisters is trained as a “professional perfectionist” in the field of accounting—striving to ensure that all the numbers perfectly add up—and the other as a “professional perfectionist” in the field of engineering—striving to ensure that airplanes are manufactured with perfect efficiency. Given my own employment as a “professional perfectionist” in publications—striving to ensure the perfect use of fonts, words, and punctuation—I suppose you can’t deny that the gene runs in the family.
As a known perfectionist, I have many times received the advice that I ought to “give myself some grace.” The grace of Christ is all-sufficient to redeem our human failings, and it is certainly never a bad idea to reground your heart in his grace. If your heart is burdened with the weight of perfectionism, then, yes, you should absolutely give yourself some grace, friend!
However, I occasionally worry that when this advice hits the ear of a perfectionist, he or she may readily interpret it as carrying a sneaky subtext—one that we must take care to avoid. Namely, I worry that we (that is, perfectionists) subconsciously identify “grace” as totally synonymous to “atonement”—which means that “grace” is only an antidote for “sin.” If the cure for perfectionism, then, is to “give oneself some [of this particular construal of] grace,” then we are at risk of understanding our mistakes as sins, such that the heart’s immediate response to one’s mistakes should be guilt—guilt that can be forgiven by Christ, but guilt nonetheless.
Certainly our mistakes can be evidence of inner sin—as when we prioritize our own agenda, entertainment, and convenience over our diligence to the word that we have committed in love to our neighbor, or when we willfully neglect to establish systems in our lives that facilitate our dependability toward others. There is a sizable gray zone here, and I will not attempt to parse out exactly when you should feel “guilty” in relation to your mistakes and when you should not. Present your heart humbly to your Father who delights to receive you, and he will illuminate the selfish tendencies of your heart and guide you forward in the knowledge of how you may counteract those tendencies in the future.
Yes, it is entirely possible that a mistake may derive from sin. However, this is not always the case. Several months ago I proofread a book in which the author described his personal struggle with perfectionism. He admitted that his perfectionism sometimes impedes his ability to receive God’s grace with ease, but he at least recognized a silver lining in the fact that God has used his perfectionism to improve the quality of his work on behalf of the kingdom of Christ.
He noted that as a result of his perfectionism, he tends to “pour over” every detail of his writing and preaching until he knows that it is just right—until he trusts that it will serve his audience well. It pained me to mark his work for fear of triggering some emotional short circuit of volatile insecurity, but ultimately I had to laugh at the irony when I corrected him that, no, actually, “your perfectionism leads you to ‘pore over’ your work.”
On occasion, sin does lay the groundwork for mistakes to follow. However, it is equally possible that the person who earnestly strives to honor and obey God with his or her work and service—such as the author I described above—will still make mistakes. (I suppose that to the people who are not perfectionists this much is already obvious. But those of us who are perfectionists—who tend to moralize the success of our performance—likely need to hear it.) Let me submit to you that we ought not primarily consider our mistakes under the heading of “sin,” but instead under the heading of “weakness.” Furthermore, I would invite you to understand your mistakes not as an occasion for guilt, but as an occasion for rejoicing!
Mistakes are best categorized as “weakness” rather than as “sin,” because even when sin has opened the door for a mistake to walk through, the mistake itself is not an act of disobedience. A mistake, considered in its own right, is merely evidence that we as humans are limited, frail creatures who were intentionally designed not to be self-sufficient, but rather to depend on the support of human communities and the mysterious and gracious providence of God.
In his treatise Against Heresies the Church Father Irenaeus argues that God’s eternal perfection is possible because God is the only uncreated being. Humans, having been created in time, must necessarily pass through a season of immaturity and imperfection until God eventually molds them into their telic state. Human weakness, therefore, is both necessary and good, and, “People who do not wait for the period of growth, who attribute the weakness of their nature to God, are completely unreasonable. … They override the law of human nature; they already want to be like God the Creator before they even become human beings.”
Irenaeus encourages Christians—rather than shunning their human weakness—to embrace it and to recognize it as evidence that their souls are in the ideal position to receive the transformative, creative grace of God:
How will one who has not yet become human become God? … How can one who has not obeyed his Maker in a mortal nature be immortal? You should first follow the order of human existence and only then share in God’s glory. You do not make God; God makes you. If you are God’s artifact, then wait for the hand of the Master which makes everything at the proper time. … Offer him a soft and malleable heart; then keep the shape in which the Master molds you. … If, however, you immediately harden yourself and reject his artistry, if you rebel against God and are ungrateful because he made you human, then you have lost not only his artistry but life itself at the same time. To create belongs to God’s goodness; to be created belongs to human nature.
Of course, this message should be nothing new to us if we have meditated on Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:9: “But [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”
Mistakes are far from the only manifestation of human weakness, but they certainly are a manifestation of it, and for this reason Paul invites us to boast in our mistakes. Why? Again—not necessarily because we are “guilty” and in need of atonement, but because our mistakes remind us that we were never intended to be God. The burden of being “put-together” enough to carry the world on your shoulders was never yours to bear.
Let’s consider an example of a way in which this logic works out practically. For all of human history (cf. Gen. 4:19–22), people have attempted to harness the power of innovation and technology to overcome our weaknesses and to inch ourselves closer to a state of omnipotent divinity. God has shown us abundant grace in these efforts, and he has redeemed many of them in order to allow humans a role of creative participation in the tangible execution of his compassion.
But all of our technologies bear the fingerprints of the humans who made them. They are all inherently susceptible to the effects of sin and to the effects of weakness, certainly including to mistakes.
Many today view the rise of artificial intelligence technology, for instance, either through the lens of hope or through the lens of terror; but both views betray a foundational divinization of technology. Whether they’ll admit to it or not, many people actually believe—or at least fear—that AI will continually build upon itself until it reaches a state of omniscience. If knowledge is power, then omniscience is omnipotence, and we had all better hope that our new, digital overlords will use their power for the good of humankind. Thus, the rise of AI (and all of our hopes and fears surrounding it) is nothing less than evidence of the human heart’s unavoidable design to need, to worship, to fear, and to hope in a higher power, re-contextualized into a secular age.
The Christian, however, has no need to fear and will also know to measure her hopes in AI (or in any other technology). Speculation about the future of technology—whether it be dys- or utopian—is of no use, because we already know that technology cannot replace God. Perfection belongs only to the uncreated and to those to whom the uncreated willfully grants it in the eschaton. Technology, however, is a creation of the creature; it cannot receive the Spirit of God, it cannot grow in wisdom, and it, therefore, will always be below us and subject to obsolescence.
Many of us who are Protestants have been fed the words of Luther time and time again that, “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.” I couldn’t agree more: of course there is Christ-honoring value in demonstrating love for one’s neighbor by working diligently on behalf of their good. But those of us who are perfectionists will be tempted to take this message too far, becoming enslaved by the anxiety that our effectiveness for the sake of the kingdom depends on the excellence of our work, of our service, and of our public presentation.
Hear this: The advancement of the kingdom—which is the only goal that really matters—does not depend on our ability to perform without mistakes. To the contrary, the power of the Lord—which, again, is the only power that really matters!—is made perfect in our imperfections.
As a result of our imperfections, we can lay claim to the good news that what God is accomplishing on earth is bigger than any one of us and bigger than any of our dreams or efforts, and we may consequently rejoice in the sufficiency of his grace. Now we are empowered to recognize that “grace” is not only a matter of “atonement,” but rather involves a holistic redemption of all of our human weaknesses for the glory and for our enjoyment of God. Through our weaknesses God will make all things right.
This is true grace, and it is into this holistic vision of grace that God calls his children.
When we are able to rejoice in our weaknesses and in God’s sufficient, holistic grace to use them for his glory, we will carry this holistic grace forward into our own human relationships. Again, we are not God, and our human exercise of grace will look a little different than his, but the transformation of our relationships will nevertheless be stunning.
For instance, we will become empowered to work through our personal insecurities that are quick to construe the mistakes of our loved ones as evidence that they do not care about us adequately, and our default attitude toward the mistakes of others will be to give them the benefit of the doubt that, more likely than not, they are trying their best to love us well.
Furthermore, rather than holding strictly to the “gospel” of self-sufficiency, we will be motivated by our Christian compassion to lend a helping hand to our neighbor when their mistakes create a mess. None of us are above the call to serve those who are struggling. You are not Atlas, and it is not your God-given right to shrug.
I am thankful that I get to spend my full-time work days caring for my three young sons—for many reasons. One of these reasons is that they keep me constantly grounded in the humble recognition that the order of the cosmos depends on God and not on me.
If you have spent much time around young children, you will likely know that (unless they for some relational or circumstantial reason are ensnared in fear, anxiety, or insecurity unbefitting for a child) they make a lot of mistakes. They spill their Cheerios. They trip over their brother’s block tower. They misunderstand the questions that adults ask them. They mindlessly hit one another with their golf clubs and break dishes and forget to bring their water bottle to practice and trample glittery, purple Play-Doh deep into the carpet.
This reality has been quite an adjustment for a certain perfectionistic mother who happens to be me.
I lived the first (and vast) majority of my life with undiagnosed ADHD, and as is common when ADHD manifests in a female, mine took form primarily in the shape of perfectionism. My brain tends to go haywire and become paralyzed and frantic when it encounters disorder and mess. Before I had children, I was generally able to ensure that my surroundings were tidy and efficient and taken care of—even if it meant going without sleep or without fun in order to stay on top of things. I was accustomed to the equation of control with emotional peace. My natural inclination, therefore, when faced with my sons’ mistakes, is to tighten my grip, to work harder to anticipate failures, and to press into a mode of greater control.
Sometimes this strategy has offered me a little temporary relief. But due the inevitability of my children’s (blessed!) embodiment of natural human weakness, my efforts to control my surroundings more often than not breed frustration, which turns into anger and resentment, which then sullies the bonds of charity, warmth, and affection that (should) exist between myself and my sons.
But thanks to the grace of God that has worked in my heart these past several years (and, let’s be real, thanks to the practical grace that is Adderall), I have largely been set free. I still work hard to anticipate failures—including my own—but I can now acknowledge that they are at some level inevitable, because we are all human. Furthermore, I can lean into peace even in view of this inevitability, because I recognize it as good that God has ordained to use our mistakes in order to build his subversive kingdom here on earth.
As I described last week, when I embrace God’s blessing upon the weaknesses of my family, I find freedom from the temptation to use the public performance of my children as a proxy for my own good reputation. Furthermore, I find freedom from the temptation to secure my sense of identity, comfort, or peace from the aesthetic and functional flawlessness of my material possessions.
I am empowered to understand my home and the possessions therein not as artifacts in the museum of my personal pleasure, but as tools with which to love my family members and our neighbors—which, yes, means welcoming stains and scuffs and Goldfish crumbs. This, naturally, empowers me to invest my treasure in the eternal kingdom rather than in the world where moth and rust and toddler destroy: There’s no use dedicating a hefty chunk of my wealth into a chic, high-maintenance car or sofa if I know that within days someone will spill electric blue Gatorade upon the upholstery.
Don’t get me wrong—I desire to teach my children to be mindful, considerate, self-aware, careful, diligent, dependable, and wise. And I desire that we all hold ourselves and one another accountable to compensate for the ways in which our mistakes intrinsically affect one another. No, mistakes in themselves are not sins, but even the most innocent mistake still bears consequences, and we honor one another in love by apologizing for the accidental hurt that we have caused our neighbor and by working to fix that which has been broken, to heal that which which has been harmed, and to restore that which was lost. We see this principle at work in Exodus 21:33: “If anyone uncovers a pit or digs one and fails to cover it and an ox or donkey falls into it, the one who opened the pit must pay the owner for the loss and take the dead animal in exchange.”
Sometimes, of course, the consequences of a mistake are dire and life-threatening and earth-shattering. Perhaps we can convince ourselves not to cry over spilt milk, but when [stuff] hits the fan, our hearts recall that it is written, “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise” (Ex. 21:23–25). We see all that our mistakes have damaged and taken, and we cower in anticipation that all of the above will be (and probably should be!) damaged in and taken from us.
The Mosaic law explicates for us the penalty due our sins (sans the mercy of Christ as ratified in the new covenant). Therefore, if our mistakes are to be counted as sins, then we should expect to see in the law provision for the due punishment of our mistakes. But see what Scripture has to say: “Anyone who strikes a person with a fatal blow is to be put to death. However, if it is not done intentionally, but God lets it happen, they are to flee to a place I will designate” (Ex. 21:12–13).
God’s law provides for the establishment of six cities of refuge to which the perpetrator of manslaughter may flee. Deuteronomy 19 explains the details of this arrangement:
This is the rule concerning anyone who kills a person and flees there for safety—anyone who kills a neighbor unintentionally, without malice aforethought. For instance, a man may go into the forest with his neighbor to cut wood, and as he swings his ax to fell a tree, the head may fly off and hit his neighbor and kill him. That man may flee to one of these cities and save his life. Otherwise, the avenger of blood might pursue him in a rage, overtake him if the distance is too great, and kill him even though he is not deserving of death, since he did it to his neighbor without malice aforethought. (vv. 4–6)
God’s provision of cities of refuge demonstrates that mistakes do have consequences—it is unreasonable to expect that these consequences will simply be swept under the rug by those whom your mistakes have hurt. It is possible that as a result of your mistakes your life might drastically change shape.
However, by establishing cities of refuge, God demonstrates his holistic grace in the promise that, even in the event of a disastrous mistake, he is not finished with you. Your story will go on, and he will use your mistakes to bring glory to his name.
Look again at Exodus 21:13: “if it is not done intentionally, but God lets it happen, they are to flee to a place I will designate.” Our mistakes, even the terrible ones, viscerally remind us that God, not any one human, is in control, even (especially!) in matters as grave as life or death.
So rejoice, my fellow perfectionists! The power of Christ is made perfect in your weakness, and this is a greater source of peace than any of your own efforts of control will ever supply. Let God be God, and let yourself be human. He loves you, and he is using you, mistakes and all, to write the most beautiful story ever told.
Until next time—
Affectionate thanks,
HLS