Kelley is a word smith, I am not.  This became glaringly obvious last night as she hacked away at some literary works.  As I posted earlier, our church is putting together a small devotion book for some kind of upcoming random thing that they’re doing.  Kelley helped to edit all of the submissions and went over mine again last night.  We discussed what, if any, changes needed to be made to my entry.  Here is the path that our discussion took.

  • Kelley said that my submission needs a last sentence to tie everything together.
  • I wanted to leave it more open so that the reader can get the message without me over-simplifying.
  • It could give the impression that I’m referring to those outside of the church as children and simplistic.
  • My writing is more centered on the actions of those in the church.  And besides, no analogy is perfect.  If we extrapolate any analogy, we can find absurdities.
  • Kelley suggested a closing line.
  • I said that the last line is the “take-away” of the submission and that hers cut out too much of what I intended.  I also didn’t like that it was borderline cliche.
  • She said, fine, we’ll leave it the way it is.
  • I said no, if it needs a closing line, that’s fine, but I want to make sure that it focuses on the intended message.
  • We put in a line and discussed it.  This discussion centered around perceived positive connotations of some words and negative connotations of others.  Also, we discussed some words with double-meanings and how the phrase could be misinterpreted.
  • We removed the line.
  • We added in another line.  We discussed it well beyond reason.

Finally, after 30 minutes, a walk through a thesaurus, and some more discussion on the intended message versus the perceived message and the importance of word choice in a couple of places, we came up with the following closing line.  I can’t tell if Kelley is happy with it or just tired of discussing the matter with me.  Either way, she signed-off.  I’ve included the entire last paragraph for reference:

While I expect my children to obey me, I understand that there are some concepts their young minds and energetic bodies cannot grasp. In those moments, I find it easiest to engage them on their level in a setting where they are free to be children. Not only do they begin to learn, but I savor the experience as well.  Similarly, if we shelter our faith within the church, we miss the opportunities, the experience, and the point.

There are two possible morals to this story:
(1) Our perfectionists natures, over-analysis, and ability to work with each other lead to a better work in the end.
(2) It’s a miracle that we can actually carry on a conversation.