I have a confession to make.

I haven’t been communicating very carefully for the last couple weeks.

And whether or not anyone but me has noticed that (I think some people have), I feel like I need to come clean, apologize, and change.

Here’s the thing. Careful communication is very, very important to me. Avoid proof texting, and verify that I am not just parroting religious philosophy that may or may not have merit. Clarify meaning. Make the distinction between what the Bible says, and what I think it means, clear. Choose my words carefully to avoid needless offense.

I don’t think I’ve been doing an awesome job of that lately, particularly in the “clarify meaning” and “choose my words carefully” department. Yes, when you’re tired and pressed for time and just want to get a post up, it’s easier to post things as-is and hope people understand what you are trying to say, than to spend fifteen minutes obsessing about the wording of one sentence. It’s HARD, particularly when you’re not exactly on top of your game.

But it is so, so important.

As a writer and communicator, that is my job–to write clearly and carefully, doing my best to remove the potential for misunderstanding and misinterpretation.

As a person who writes about faith, I am accountable to speak with scrupulous integrity about God and the Bible (and by scrupulous integrity I don’t mean “being truthful”–God help me if I was intentionally untruthful about that!–I mean making sure that I am representing scripture fully, responsibly, and in context to the best of my ability, instead of just parroting what I think it means or what my Sunday School teachers said it means).

And while I can’t completely control whether people misunderstand or misinterpret what I have to say, the bulk of the responsibility for clear communication relies on the communicator, not the communicatee.

(See, communicatee isn’t good grammar. I don’t even think it’s a word! But I bet you know what it means anyway, and that it communicated clearly. So I’m okay with that.)

So, I apologize for my sloppy communication as of late. Maybe you didn’t notice, or maybe you are familiar enough with me or my writing that you understood what I meant. But in any case, I haven’t quite been writing up to my own standards recently, and this is my acknowledgement of that and commitment to do better!