Was it a miracle?

On Saturday morning, I got one of those phone calls, the kind with which you know, just by the fact of who is calling, that you're either in for a visit or for bad news. It was bad news: the brother of a friend was hospitalized with a serious illness.

The catch was, the friend still lives in Virginia, where we knew her before moving seven years ago. Meanwhile, her brothers lives and is hospitalized in Canton, Ga. Our friend was in Canton, and was looking for a church that could reach out to her brother.

Now, for the amazing part: After leaving Virginia, we lived five years in Florida till moving to the northern suburbs of Atlanta in 2003--not far from Canton. Then we joined Cherokee Presbyterian Church in Woodstock, which decided just this summer to relocate--to Canton. When we finally touched base with our friend later in the day, she was ecstatic that there was someone she knew in the Atlanta metro area and that those folks were part of a church in her brother's back yard. Her comment: "It's just a miracle!"

I understand her sentiment. Yet, I wouldn't classify this chain of events as miraculous, at least not in the sense of the biblical miracles. In those instances, God used His power in clearly supernatural ways. God's fingerprints are clearly all over these circumstances, but in them we see His providence, His wise ordering of all things for the good of His people and His glory.

And yet, living as we do in a culture that sees the world as operating on blind chance, any clear evidence of God's providential working is prone to receiving the label of "miracle."

The lesson in all of this, I think, is that we need to retrain our eyes to see that God's hand is at work in myriad ways every minute all around us. The Word of God indicates that all things are ordered by our sovereign God. As hard as it is to say it, that must include my friend's brother's illness. We would never call such a hard providence miraculous, because it troubles rather than comforts us, but the God of providence stands behind it just the same. And somewhere within it there must be something comforting and lovely, for it comes from the God who is both powerful and very, very good.

The invisible profession

Editing is the invisible profession. I say that because it's very hard to show, or even tell, people what you do. Editors take a piece of writing, improve it, and pass it along. The edited version may be quite different from the original, but when it appears in print, there is no acknowledgement of the editor's contribution. And the editor certainly can't say to the guys, "Hey, see this sentence about the mayor about halfway down? That was a sentence fragment before I got through with it!" Try that sometime and see what kinds of looks you get.

Given this invisibility, editors crave any sort of creative outlet they can find. Among newspaper copy editors, that outlet is headlines. Yes, those headlines in your daily paper are written by copy editors, not the reporters. And you would not believe how much work goes into some of those headlines. I don't think I have ever known a copy editor who didn't enjoy writing an accurate headline with an attention-getting twist.

I'll always remember my greatest headline. I was working part-time on the Orlando Sentinel copy desk and was assigned a front-page story about a small Orlando attraction called the Holy Land Experience. The operators of the Holy Land Experience had been in a dispute with the city over property taxes. The Holy Land Experience contended it was a ministry, and therefore tax exempt, but the city insisted it was an attraction. Finally, a judge ruled that the Holy Land Experience did owe taxes. I had to write a two-column, three-deck head in a fairly large type size, but I managed to come up with something that was accurate and creative. It was:

Holy Land
must render
unto Caesar

I was excited about that head, but I thought there was a strong chance the editors above me might conclude that the average reader wouldn't understand the biblical allusion and would ask me to rewrite it. However, they did approve it and it appeared in the paper the next morning, visible from every paper box in the city. I got lots of compliments from my fellow copy editors and even heard my headline read on a local radio talk show the next day.

That was a copy editor's dream come true--visibility.

Semper Revisanda?

One of the slogans of the Protestant Reformation was Semper Reformanda, or "always reforming." The idea was that we always need to be re-examining our life and beliefs against the standard of Scripture. I like that.

As a Reformed Christian who happens to be an editor, I spend a lot of my time revising the way things read. Thus, Semper Revisanda. It's probably not very good Latin, but it works for me.

These are my thoughts about living the Christian life with a red pen in hand (or Microsoft Word's tracking feature, as the case may be).