Looking Again

If you've visited here over the past two weeks, you may have noticed the silence.

It wasn't because there was nothing to say. Quite the opposite.

Every spare moment was devoted to preparing 40 Days with the Daughters of the Story for publication. There were final edits, layout adjustments, artwork refinements, proof copies to review, corrections to make, and countless little details that only seem to appear when you think you've reached the finish line.

Publishing a book is an interesting thing. There comes a point when you've read every page so many times that your mind no longer reads the words—it reads what it expects to see. You know every paragraph. Every image. Every heading. Your eyes become familiar with the work, and familiarity can sometimes become its own blind spot.

The proof copy arrived.

Friends looked through it.

Family looked through it.

I looked through it.

More than once.

Everything seemed ready.

Then launch day arrived.

As I excitedly looked at the Amazon listing, something caught my eye.

One word.

One simple spelling error.

Not hidden inside two hundred pages.

Right there.

On the cover.

The place every single person had looked.

My heart sank.

After all those hours, all those reviews, all those careful checks...how could every one of us have missed something so obvious?

The answer, I think, is that we were too close to it.

We weren't careless.

We weren't lazy.

We had simply become so familiar with the cover that our minds filled in what should have been there instead of what actually was.

Thankfully, the mistake could be corrected. The cover was revised, uploaded again, and now I find myself waiting for Amazon's updated preview so I can approve the corrected version.

As disappointing as that moment was, it reminded me of something much more important.

Isn't that often how repentance works?

The word repent is often misunderstood. Many hear it and immediately think of guilt or punishment. But the biblical idea is far richer. It means to change our mind, to turn, to see differently than we did before.

Sometimes we become so accustomed to our own thoughts, habits, attitudes, or assumptions that we no longer notice where they need correcting. Like reading our own manuscript for the hundredth time, we see what we expect instead of what is actually there.

Then, by God's grace, something catches our attention.

A conversation.

A quiet prompting.

A passage of Scripture.

A sermon.

A friend willing to speak truth with love.

Suddenly we see what we couldn't see before.

God doesn't reveal those moments to embarrass us. He reveals them because He loves us too much to leave us unchanged.

Just as I immediately corrected the cover once I saw the mistake, our Heavenly Father invites us to respond when He gently points something out in our lives. Repentance isn't about pretending we never made an error. It's about recognizing it, accepting His grace, and allowing Him to make the correction.

The remarkable thing is that God is never surprised by what He finds in us.

He already knows.

Yet He still patiently invites us to look again.

To see with clearer eyes.

To become a little more like Christ today than we were yesterday.

I'm grateful the cover can be corrected.

I'm even more grateful that our Heavenly Father patiently continues correcting the cover of our hearts.

Sometimes all it takes is one small change to reveal a much better story.