A Prick In The Eye

Monday afternoon’s mail from the printer brought the proof pages for my book A Dirty Old Man Goes Bad and the first thing I saw as I opened the package was a misspelling!

AHGGGGG!

The second thing I saw was a minor formatting error.

AHGGGGGG! AHGGGGG!

I discovered both mistakes within two minutes of opening the pages.

Some words which you will not find printed in the Bible escaped my lips.

I thought I’d honed this manuscript to perfection. I thought I had no more work to do on it. I expected to rubber stamp the proofs and move on to other projects dear to my heart. I felt sick of working on this manuscript and I didn’t want to fool with it any more.

Here comes an insidious train of thought:

Why bother making corrections? These mistakes are so minuscule that no one else is likely to notice them. Don’t want to get hung up on trivial details. Don’t want to be an obsessive perfectionist. These little things don’t matter. You could spend all day just punctuating your grocery list. Besides, who’s likely to buy this book anyway? I doubt if six people will read the thing; so why bother putting another week’s work into searching for mistakes when you’ve already been over this manuscript a dozen times already?

So I was tempted to ignore shoddy workmanship.

Ever heard the phrase, Close enough for government work?

I’ve already started another project and I don’t want to return and re-do work I’ve already done. I’m sick of this book and I want to move on to fresh material.

Back in the days when I worked as a janitor, one part of my job was cleaning public urinals. Like the labor of Sisyphus (the Greek guy who pushed the bolder up the hill when it kept rolling back down) the task never ended. No matter how well I’d clean one night, they’d be slimy the next day. I was tempted to say what’s the use and cut corners and just do the minimum the job required.

I fought that temptation by realizing I did not work for the building manager, or for the public, but for Jesus Christ. So I tried to clean those urinals as though the Lord God Himself would be the next guy to piss there.

Yesterday morning as I thought about re-doing those proof pages, a phrase in my morning Bible reading brought an odd image to my mind.

I sometimes read a snippet of Scripture with my coffee at the start of a day and Tuesday’s passage was from the Book of Numbers. Here’s the verse that caught my attention:

“If ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; ... those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell”…..NUMBERS. 33:55.

As the Jews entered the Promised Land, God told them to exterminate the idol worshipers already living there. The Jews had a better idea. Instead of killing the idol worshipers, they made treaties with the Gibeonites and enslaved others to cut firewood and carry water buckets – before long the heathen led the Jews themselves into idol worship. The people they should have taken care of and exterminated became thorns in their sides, undermined their souls, and disrupted their peace.

I’m sure the Bible verse refers to that sort of thing…

But the phrase “pricks in your eyes” reminded me of something else. Somehow, that phrase congers up a different image to me… it’s not exactly the image the Bible writer had in mind I’m sure -- but it is effective.

So, I’ve written all that just to say that for the rest of this week I’ll be going over those proof pages again and doing as thorough a job as I can of correcting my mistakes – even the little ones.