Mom's notebook

My mom’s notebook

When I was growing up, my mom kept tedious notes of just about everything you can imagine in her orange notebook: Everything from addresses and phone numbers to Christmas card lists, medication or vitamins taken list, gift ideas for people of different ages (good gifts for 3 yr olds, good gifts for 10 year olds, etc), daily calendar, birthdays, chore lists, to-do lists, books to read, movies to watch, prayer requests and more. She would add to these lists and pages and put in a new calendar each year, but always carry the same notebook. Once I was married and had children she tried to teach me this method. It was quite helpful, but I could never keep it up and it took up too much room in the diaper bag. I also didn’t like carrying around a bulky notebook (even though it was more like a zippered, heavy, giant Bible cover filled with pages). My mom, on the other hand, has had her notebook for as long as I can remember. She carries it around faithfully, writes all kinds of notes in it faithfully, and she stays very organized because of this system.

And now my mom is keeping an extra notebook, a different kind of notebook: My sister’s cancer notebook. This past month and a half has leant itself to massive amounts of paperwork, note taking, doctors’ offices cards, visitors, prescriptions and instructions for them, recipes to try for my sister as well as a diet log, a separate calendar for upcoming doctor or specialist appointments, things to look up, lists of things to ask about, insurance, and more. Keeping up with this notebook and the things it contains is basically a full time job, as well as my mom’s current life. Who would have known that all these years of practice (before the cancer notebook came along) would have prepared my mom for the records she’s keeping now? God works in ways we never could have imagined. What kind of God lays the path for preparing my mom for her full time notebook job? The God of the universe. The One in control of Cherie’s cancer. The One that knows our every need. The One who knows we are sinners, yet chooses to do these little things to show us His love and power because we are His…Such little things as preparing my mom to keep a notebook years before we knew my mom would need this one.

“The Lord is righteous in all His ways and kind in all His works.”  Psalms 145:17

The interesting thing about this all is this: When we went to the oncologist to find out about chemo, our minds filled with questions and concerns, notes written on pieces of random paper, the Doctor handed us a big blue notebook, created by the American Cancer Society, to help keep track of all sorts of things…the things my mom already had so carefully and tediously prepared in a pink notebook for her own daughter’s cancer. The blue one contained lots of information as well, but the pink one is the one my mom is using. As I look through the pink one, there is my mom’s handwriting, the tabs she neatly wrote, her system. I prefer the pink notebook, too.

“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” 

Romans 11:36