The Blue Spiral Notebook

I am home. And among the many welcome back surprises (including about 50 balloons from Abby!), there was in the mail a package from a man named Mark who found my notebook and sent it back to me.

This was an item of absolutely NO monetary value whatsoever, but of extreme importance to me. It was stuffed full with notes and journal entries, pictures, lists, letters and ideas, all concerning Hot Springs and the family Highview sponsors in Thailand. It contained notes collected not just for this trip, but from all of last trip as well. Items our Sponsor Jen Connor and I had sat down together to list. Ideas for what I should bring home for the Christmas Bazaar. Pictures the kids themselves had drawn for me. Addresses, letters in Thai, candy wrappers of grave significance...all that sort of thing.

I had carelessly left my blue spiral notebook behind in the pocket of my plane seat on the very first leg of my journey to Thailand this month. I last had it on March 8th, having pulled it out of my backpack for a thorough going over during the first, five hour ride. The gentleman beside me was chatty, however, and I never did open it. When the time came to pack up and get off the plane, I managed to gather up everything else, but not the notebook.

How I failed to check that seat pocket and leave all that priceless information behind is still something I just have to choose to forgive myself for. When I realized it was gone, I allowed myself about 5 minutes of abject grief. And then I gave it to God.

The notebook is His after all. I gave it to Him about a thousand times, every time I've sung one of those dangerous surrender songs in church. Everything I own is His. So....He just gently reminded me, that the notebook...wasn't mine. Throughout the rest of my trip, I kept trying to remember what was in there....and got myself a new notebook in Chiang Mai to start over with the lists.

So what an amazing surprise to find my blue spiral notebook in my mailbox today, my first day back!!!

The guy who sent it back included a note. He'd found it, he'd said, and it seemed important. So he sent it back to me. He would have had to dig around a bit for my address, and it cost him about $7.00 in postage. I am so incredibly grateful for his courtesy and kindness. And how God can use a stranger to remind on of His forgetful children, that even though everything is His, He still cares for the details.


I will try to unpack slowly this week. Not just my suitcases, but my soul as well. There were SO MANY gifts for me this year, so many deep, important learnings, that I believe not only have helped me in my own spiritual journey toward God, but will help form and direct our delightful and amazing partnership with Suradet and Yupa as we move forward together.

I am overwhelmed with the bigness and the smallness of a God who sees how to bring together two churches from exactly the opposite sides of the world...something so grand and broad, AND who can put just the right person in the same seat I had the flight before, to send something home that I really, really hated losing....something so small in "insignificant".