Editing

When I was in high school, my job was operating the shot clock at school basketball games. It was a pretty sweet gig and higher paying per hour than most high school jobs were. And it was a lot of fun.

But I noticed that when I would watch college basketball games on TV during high school and into my freshman year of college, my finger would twitch when the shot clock needed to be reset. My brain was so programed to hit that reset button that I did it without thinking—even when there was no button to press.

Fast forward to after college, when I worked for a church in the children's ministry. One part of my job was making the kids' bulletin, and that interfaced with my life, too. I'd look for new kinds of puzzles I could use when I was doing puzzles in my free time, and I couldn't get through a sermon without playing the bingo I'd created...and looking around to see how many kids were using the bulletin.

So it wasn't surprising to me that when I became an editor, it impacted the way I read. To clear up a common point of confusion, I'm a content editor. Although I do fix grammatical mistakes when I see them, my job is making sure content makes sense, fits our filters, and is the best it can be. I do a lot of critiquing, rearranging, and evaluating. Then we have an awesome team of assistant editors who polish it up and make it all consistent and grammatically accurate.

And I noticed almost immediately after starting my job that the speed at which I read books in my free time slowed waaaay down. Because I was constantly critiquing the order of things, and wondering whether the editor made the writer include that sentence...stuff like that.

But recently I realized that editing impacts my life in a far greater way than just the way I read books. And it's not good. I realized that I edit people. When I see someone I haven't met, when I hear someone talk, when I interact with someone...I realized that my brain is editing even then. I'm critiquing. I'm evaluating. I'm thinking of how to make what they do, say, or look like better for the setting.

It's really pretty terrible. It's presumptuous at best. But really...it's just plain sinful. Why am I editing something God made? I think he might know a little better than me. Maybe it's time to edit inward and learn to stop editing people.

Born to Write

I'm always fascinated to hear stories of how kids show their personalities at an early age, and how that connects to where they end up in life. And that includes my own reflections on childhood.

I didn't go to preschool; my mom helped each of us kids learn to read and write and such before we went off to kindergarten. And the thing I absolutely loved was my phonics workbook.

My sisters would get on the school bus in the morning and my mom didn't have any time to settle down before I would say, "Can we do phonics!?!? Can we do phonics!?!?" I was so eager to learn to read and write.

Now, I'm a writer and editor. I love thinking back on little 4-year old Ali begging to learn to read and write, and thinking about how God created me to do just what I do. He knew when he knit me together in my mother's womb that he was making me with a passion for words. He knew he was wiring me with a dose of creativity that he would use for his kingdom as I grew up to work for a Christian publishing company.

I didn't just fall into this job by coincidence. God created me with a specific purpose in mind, and that purpose was wired in me from early in my childhood. I couldn't wait to get started! It gives me goosebumps to think about how God has a purpose in mind for each of us and wires us to do just that.