Making a Mark (blog)
People have given me decorative journals as gifts, and I take them down from my closet shelf from time to time, dust them off and admire them. The covers are so beautiful, but I especially love all those crisp, blank pages just waiting to be filled, so full of promise. Someday their wait will be over, when I have more time, when I have something journal-worthy to write about, when my handwriting no longer reflects my stress level but rather a new-found, serene peace of mind and body...I do have two 'garden journals' (lined composition notebooks) which I have actually made marks in. One dates back from the time when my daughters were very young, followed me everywhere and always wanted to have their hands in my flower pots. The other spans a later time when the girls liked a bit of distance from me and didn't have much interest in plants.The earlier journal is a mishmash of my own quickly penned entries, my girls' crayoned notes and some photographs taped on the pages. I kept a record of which plants we grew, and the girls scribbled words under and around the photos of themselves tending their own little pots and plots. Looking back over this first journal the other day, I discovered that my miscreants secretly added other notations about how "boring" a newly tilled plot of ground looked and about what a "goofball" their dad was.The second, later journal consists of my entries alone and includes longer, meaningful reflections. I can tell you from this journal not just which variety of green bean or marigold thrives best in my neighborhood, but also what songbirds made their homes there and how the long shadows of August look as they stretch across my yard. There are even a few pages about enduring Hurricane Sandy. Without little girls in tow I had time to branch out into observing and recording these details. Writing in this journal was rewarding to me at the time, as were the personal experiences.How surprising it is then, that as I look back through the two journals now I find this second one a bit, well, "boring". The memories, which were all my own alone and so savored at the time, have faded into that broader sense of well-being, so elusive and transient, that solitary experience allows.But that first journal, oh, I never tire of looking at that one! Paging through it brings everything, all of those rich memories with my daughters, rushing back like I'm feeling the actual refreshment of the breeze that blew through our hair on those long, hot summer days. It's as if I'm with my little girls again in those shared experiences, so enjoyable and trying and exhausting all at the same time.I miss that time we had together. I miss the flowers that my older daughter drew at the end of her sentences, and the way my younger daughter still wrote her name backward and had no idea how to spell. Little things, and yet they have left such a mark in me. I'm rethinking what "meaningful" means (who wants to remember Hurricane Sandy?).Strange, how I cannot leave lasting and recognizable marks in my own life even in those times of serene peace of mind and body. I'm like a blank journal, always waiting for someone else's pen strokes.It was in those shared gardening experiences, good ones and bad, that my daughters and I made marks in each other's lives. Each day was a new page to fill, often with scribbles and cross-outs as we figured out who we were and what we were doing and how to be in relationship together. Those experiences are so meaningful to me now.And through them I see how our Lord Jesus Christ had to walk the earth and talk with us - to live life with us - personally penning the story of salvation, in order to make deep, eternal marks in us. He has recreated us to live life with Him each day, one page at a time. He calls us to be in relationship with the people He has placed around us, making marks through shared experiences with them.They're crayoned scribbles really, our marks compared to the ones that Jesus leaves, but they're journal-worthy in His sight, precious and lasting.Now is the time to make them.