My Notes

In my office I have thirteen large spiral notebooks totally filled with handwritten notes. These were taken during summer sessions (mostly) at the university while I was doing graduate studies. Not all the notes were classroom notes; many of them were taken from books or articles I had read, discussions engaged in, out-of class lectures or addresses attended, musings or collected thoughts or quotations, or other things that particularly inspired me.

One of the people in my early academic life who inspired me was a man who in his own life did essentially the same thing and who said that over the course of his life his notes became his most valued possession. He said that thought of his reading as a combine harvester that one would find on a farm. This machine cuts everything it passes through but throws out the weeds and straw and chaff and puts only the wheat into the hopper.

Standing on the shoulders of this giant I have done that to great advantage with my own reading and writing. I have taken notes from books I did not own, and from books that I do own have underlined, crossed out, and annotated, every book I think I have read in the past 40 years. My annotated Bible is my most valued single book. I cannot envision me ever wanting a new one.

I have done this editing even with my own notes, lectures, sermons, essays and letters. I reread them with delight and get a ‘new’ education with each reading.

Finally, what a blessing the computer has been to me in this regard for the past 26 years. Like I do with my notebooks and bound volumes, I often look at my computer files and now the photographs my wife and I have taken from our many travels. Even if none of my children or stepchildren has any interest in these personal treasures when I close this chapter of my life, it has given me great pleasure and been time well spent. I am convinced that these things have been impressed on the engrams of my soul and so I will be a Celestial traveler with a full ‘backpack’ or ‘mindpack’ on the great journey that beckons.