I took this picture around 7:00 Monday morning.

I saw the clouds as I was looking through the window. They looked so pink against the blue sky that I had to have a picture, so I grabbed my camera and went out on the patio.

Then I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before; the electric lines and telephone wires. When I looked at the trees and the sky in the my backyard, my mind took away the lines; they were erased; edited out. But when I looked on my camera screen, they were still there, dark and bold and in the way.

My mind is pretty good at editing out what I don’t want to see. The negative traits of the motorcycle-riding boyfriend my mom wanted me to break up with. The mistakes I made as a young teacher. The bad decisions I made when I drove 400 miles to visit a different boyfriend and ended up with a broken car window in the middle of March.

Those editing skills come in handy, too. It’s not all bad. Parents naturally edit out the sleepless nights and the difficulty of parenting a newborn, and then go through it all over again. Disagreements between husbands and wives need to be edited out, or there would be an even higher rate of divorce. Loving your neighbor as yourself demands some editing.

What telephone wires do you edit out of your life?