I served a stint as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In that capacity, I did a lot of research on marijuana and methamphetamine. (In case you’ve been wondering, the United States has something of a drug problem.) I wrote papers for the intelligence community, and wrote strategies for our task forces.
One of my more frequent duties was writing letters to congressional representatives and senators explaining our program, to newspapers explaining that they completely misreported drug stories, and to law enforcement officials asking them to play nice. These letters were written by me, but they were all signed by my boss, an ex-Assistant Special Agent in Charge with the DEA. He, according to the rumor mill, knew where all the bodies were buried. (My wife idolized him, because he knows Harrison Ford.)
Since his signature went on all of them, he was painfully thorough in his editing, from the punctuation to the tone. In the five years I worked there, I wrote one letter that didn’t require revision. I remember it vividly. He dropped it on my desk, already signed, and said, “Perfect. Mail it.”
One day he wrote a particularly sensitive letter himself. He handed his handwritten draft to me and said, “Clean that up.” Was I shocked! It was awful. The sentence structure was confusing. It was redundant in places. There were misspelled words and missing punctuation. I typed it out with revisions, and took it to him. He then made corrections and brought it back to me for revision.
My dad was once a bookkeeper, and his supervisor went over every balance sheet and letter carefully. One day she explained why it was so important to have another set of eyes on every document: “No one can proofread his own stuff. When we write something, we read what we meant to say, not what we actually said. We always need another set of eyes.”
Too much of what pastors do happens in solitary. We can work or not work, and who would know? We need another set of eyes. Paul said, “…if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged” (1 Corinthians 11:31, NKJV). But we don’t so we have to be judged.  And we have to find someone we can trust to do it for us.
“Nobody can proofread himself.” We need proofing for of our work, our motives, our spirit, our manner of living, and- probably- our sermons. “Faithful are the wounds of a friend,” said Solomon (Proverbs 27:6, NKJV). From the looks of things, he never found a faithful friend to wound him. We can do better than that.