Typing Mistakes in the Name of the Lord

By Mike Dotson

I am a horrible typist. Most people would never know how badly I type. I type about as many characters per minute as people type words per minute. Spellchecker is my best computer friend. He catches so many of my mistakes. He makes me look smarter than I really am. He diplomatically asks me questions like, “Are you sure you would like to say that, or type that word that way?” I tend to yield to his wisdom, to his infinite knowledge. What I especially like is his ability to catch my mistakes, and correct them, before I even know that I had made a mistake in the first place. He quietly just fixes so many of the mistakes.

He has a little color coded way of letting me know that something is amiss. Green says- “Mike you are almost right, but not exactly there yet.” Red however says- “Mike you might know what you wanted to type or say, but the rest of the world is going to scratch their head and wonder what you just typed.”

I have painfully found out that my dear friend Spellchecker is not perfect. He is not infallible; he doesn’t always have my back. He makes mistakes and doesn’t read my mind. He allows me to type things without raising either a green or red flag.

I have a couple of my favorites that I would like to share. As a religious Bible writing kind of a person, I type some words frequently like pray. I have discovered that Spellchecker doesn’t distinguish pray from pry If I don’t type the letter A, he doesn’t say a word. Another time, I was typing from a passage from Galatians and I wanted to type “to be made right with God” instead, I typed, “to be made tight with God” Spellchecker was silent once again.

I began thinking; is there not an element in my prayers where I wish to pry? Pry is not one of those words that you or I are going to use a lot in our daily vocabulary. Webster, a very literate friend of Spellchecker, says pry is a tool to move or raise something by leverage. Are not my prayers a leverage tool?  Doesn’t God say something about moving mountains through our prayers of faith? 

When I typed to be tight with God, isn’t that what we need, what we are truly after. To have such a tight relationship with God that it feels right to be tight with him. If I am right with him, will I not be tight with Him?

Maybe Spellchecker was right all along, and I just didn’t see it.