Stained Notebooks

I’m sitting at my desk in my bedroom.  Feeling contemplative after talking with children who can’t be with their mother who is dying in a facility, and looking at graduation pictures of other children I used to watch play on the floor.

The notebooks I use for work sit quietly by.  Some are used up and some are brand new.  Side by side, I notice the difference between them.  The used ones seem to have thicker pages, wrinkles, rips, and coffee stains.  The new ones are crisp.  Simply blank and available for use, having no more of an idea what will fill their pages than I do.

I imagine what each of our books looks like.  Not a bunch of little books with lots of names.  But, a big book with only one name.  Yours.  Mine.

I purchased the printed version of this blog last November.  It is printed on 8.5 x 11 paper, weighs about seven pounds, and is over an inch thick.  When it arrived, I marveled at its substance.  Did writing periodically over seven years really amount to something that I could hold?  Something that would feel heavy in my hands?  

Can you imagine if the story of each one of our lives were actually written down on paper?  The number and weight of the pages?  

In the physical life, they are written in our bodies, our hearts, and on our faces.  Grandma Bert is the perfect example, and my favorite, as well.

Her birthday was May 16th.  She would have been a spicy 93.  Her story was written on her face.  Her beautiful face.  Her lack of education and finances, her abusive husband, a murdered sister, losing three of her five sons to traumatic deaths, including the Vietnam War, and all of the long years in between.  And she smiled in spite of it all.  Man, I love (and miss) her.  

I imagine the weight of her book, containing all of the stuff of her 86 years.  I would love to read it in its entirety.  

Actually, I would rather she read it to me.  

I believe she is in Heaven and I hope to see her again there one day.  Should that happen, I may ask her.  But, maybe it isn’t as important there as it is here.  Or maybe it is.

Your eyes beheld my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them...     Psalm 139:16