The Value of Writing Things Down

I have never been a big fan of writing things down.  This is probably the result of a combination of bad handwriting and a good memory.  I don’t keep a unified calendar, and rarely take notes on things I am listening to or reading.  The only related thing I do is make to-do lists on Post-It notes, usually with one word items, to make sure I don’t forget certain things.  That is the most minimal way I could possibly write things down.  All of the notes I took in college fit into a single 5-subject spiral bound notebook, which is not even half full.  Even in that case, the action of writing them down was probably more significant than having a permanent record, since I rarely ever went back to read or study them.

But recently I have had a lot more trouble remembering things, or keeping them all straight in my mind.  I have double booked myself a couple times, and totally missed a valuable opportunity, because I am not in the habit of writing things down.  I have had similar trouble coming up with content to post here recently.  I have about five good ideas a day in that regard, but I forget most of them before I have a chance to flesh them out in detail.  I deliberately focus on trying to remember them when they occur to me, because I am conscious of the fact that they have been slipping away recently, and while that method has served me well for the last 25 years, it doesn't have such a good track record over the last couple of weeks.

One of the books I have been reading made a really good point about how this applies to our relationship with God, but I can't remember what it was. (Just kidding;)  The issues we are facing in the present always feel worse than those in the past, because when looking back at issues in the past, they don't appear to be as significant from that perspective as they felt at the time.  We see illustrated both in the Bible, and our own lives, that we frequently forget God's power and what he has done for us.  The Israelites constantly forgot yesterday's miracles when encountering trials during the Exodus, and the Apostles had similar issues, even after witnessing Jesus' miracles.  God frequently answers our prayers, but in ways that appear “natural.”  Once we overcome a certain trial, we tend to forget about it, especially from an emotional perspective, how we felt when confronted by that problem.  We can counter this tendency by writing down what we are praying for and how we feel about it.  This can help us remember in the future how big the issues were that God brought us through in the past, which puts whatever we are facing at the time into perspective.

I didn't do this much in the past, since I don’t write much down, but I do write things I send to other people.  In reading messages I sent in the past, I am reminded of how I felt when confronted by certain significant decisions, by how I described those situations to other people..  Those events seem simple in hindsight, viewed from the perspective of knowing the outcome, but at the time I saw things very differently.  Hopefully my writings here will offer a similar look into my changing views as I grow.