What is Written About Me

Just as I walked in the door to conduct another interview with my WW2 veteran friend Comer, a nurse's aid was walking out with a book in hand.
"You must be Vicky," she said, "I was just showing Comer this book by one of our residents and he told me you were coming to interview him for his book!"
"Yes, I am going to write a book about him. There are not many WW2 vets left."
"Well when you finish, I am going to read it," she said.
Good! That means one sure sale, I thought.

Comer was well prepared. He had pages of notes he had carefully organized for our interview.
"I think we skipped a good bit," he told me. I glanced through my 30 pages of notes I had taken over our last sessions.
"We did?"
"There is so much to tell," he said.
"Well I bought a nice recorder so I don't have to write so fast," I told him,"Shall I turn it on now?"
He nodded.
He began telling stories now as though he were on TV. He sat up straighter and spoke in full sentences, carefully choosing his words. I saw a glimmer of the charismatic man that had led a gun crew through the decisive battle of the south Pacific that turned the Japanese assault on Australia around.
"Wait a moment," I said interrupting, "Do you mean that you were having to duck your head under water in the trenches to avoid the bombs?"
He looked straight at the tape recorder and said, "A question has been raised about whether I had to duck my head under water in the trenches during bombing raids. The answer is yes. The water was so deep during the rainy season that we stood for 3 weeks nearly underwater during the bombing runs."
I cringed at the image, but smiled at the professional demeanor with which he was approaching our interview sessions. This was a man who had worked hard his whole life, a self made millionaire who needed a job as badly as I needed a nice haircut, maybe more. If the book never got written, I thought, it didn't even matter. Comer was honored and delighted to be involved. He was overjoyed that someone wanted to write his story.

Before I left, he handed me a 6 inch thick book titled, "Milne Bay- 1942".
"This is my battle, but from the Australian perspective."
Comer had been the gun crew #1 leader- a significant position in the battle of Milne Bay.
"Are you in this book!?"
"No," he said, clearly miffed,"I looked and looked but they don't seem to mention the American gun crews at all. I have never found a book about what the Americans did at Milne Bay."
"Then mine will be a first!" I said happily.
"Yes," he said, dabbing at his eyes.

As I walked down the hall of the Assisted Living Center, an old woman with a walker looked at me and shouted, "Where's Alice?"
I stopped and said, "Is she in her room?"
(I had no idea who the woman was or who Alice was, but assumed she had a room somewhere.)
"No, I just looked!"
"I bet the receptionist out there can tell you," I told the woman gently.
She smiled at me and in a quieter voice said, "Thankyou."

We just want to be acknowledged. We want to be heard. We want our accomplishments noted. We want to know we were more than just a vapor that materialized briefly and then vanished with no one taking notice. I wish I could write a book about everyone. Everyone I have ever met has a story worth telling, worth remembering, worth chronicling. I want to write my own grandparents and great-grandparents story. It is a fascinating history of the struggle of immigrants in a new world. But, I can only do so much. My aching ulnar nerve is prohibiting extensive writing from a physical perspective, and my homeschooling obligations prevent it from a time perspective.

However, our stories are not being lost, nor the ones I can't write going unnoticed. None of them. God is numbering every hair on our head. With such attention to detail, He is not forgetting a single scene from a single life. Everything is known, something that gives me comfort...and also makes me gulp. Before Jesus was incarnated as a man on earth, His life was prophesied and written about thousands of years prior to His coming. And the Bible reminds us that if everything Jesus taught and said were recorded, there would not be enough books to hold it! But there is a Book of Life, and we are in it, unless we request through unbelief that our name be crossed off. That is one interview we really all ought to take seriously.

Luke 24:44
He said to them, "This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms."

Revelation 20:15
Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.

Revelation 3:5
The one who is victorious will, like them, be dressed in white. I will never blot out the name of that person from the book of life, but will acknowledge that name before my Father and his angels.

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