Page Proofs

Page Proofs

I received (by FedEx) the page proofs for my long-gestating second “baby”—two fat envelopes each stuffed with a hundred or so pages of clean, ordered type.

The page-proof stage of the publishing process may be my favorite. The almost-but-not-quite pages I leaf through are close—so close—to the secret ideas I’ve carried for so long in my head and my heart.

I know to treasure this “almost there” time. I know that holding the finished product in my hands and brushing the cover with my palm will be a fleeting moment. That I can only open a book’s cover and pop its stiff spine for the first time once. That the freshly printed smell of new pages will quickly disappear and that no matter how careful we’ve all been, there will be a typo (and I will find it).

Now, almost made, the book is still no one’s but mine. In a short time my long-cherished secret will be out, and I’ll have no say over where it goes or what it says. It will no longer belong to just me, and I won’t be sitting at the shoulder of every reader (thank goodness!) saying, “Oh, no—this is what I meant—not that!”

My time for creating is done, but the book’s promise is just beginning.

I fumble my way through the stories I tell, trying to hold the thread of their original inspiration, fighting to keep it, losing my place. But God never loses his place in my story. I can’t see more than vaguely into the next chapter, or even the next page. And even if I’ve planned well, sometimes a story takes me places I never meant to go.

Not so with him. He is an omnipotent, omniscient storyteller. He skips the page proofs altogether and moves from invisible to everlasting in one perfect thought.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,” even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you. . . . Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.

Psalm 139:11-12, 14, ESV