If It’s Written Down, It Must be True.

My third son always dashed into the house after school with the same words on his lips: “What’s for dinner?”

Invariably, I’d look up from the computer with a woozy brain–still caught in the  1830’s Texas, 1720’s Virginia, or even a mere 1918 Utah–and feel totally blank.

“What’s for dinner, Mom?”

“Dinner,” I’d grope for the concept and finally remember. “I made dinner.”

Stargazer is a scientist. “What are we having?”

I knew I’d made something. I always tried to get dinner done early in the day so I could get lost in the past. “It’s in the refrigerator.”

“What is it?” He’s always practical.

A wave of the hand, “Just look and see.”

Sometimes if he’d bring the casserole over, I could actually recognize what it was, and that always made him happy.

Stargazer’s a stickler for lists. If it’s written down, it has to be true. Earlier in his life, I use to post a list on the refrigerator of what I planned to cook for dinner. It made him feel secure. He could rush in and examine it. “It says here, Wednesday: enchilada pie. I love enchilada pie. That’s great.”

Except one day I substituted macaroni and cheese for the enchilada pie written on the list.

He was outraged. “It says right here, enchilada pie. You aren’t supposed to make macaroni and cheese when it says enchilada pie.”

He marched me over and stabbed the list with his index finger to prove what it said.

Flabbergasted, I tried to explain the list was just a suggestion of what I could cook. I reserved the right to make substitutions.

“That’s not the way it works, Mom,” Stargazer insisted. “When you write it down, you have to do it.”

That’s when I stopped posting my meal planning list. My looseness with the facts created too many moral dilemmas for my son. Of course it also meant he got frustrated when I couldn’t remember what I’d made for dinner, but at least I wasn’t misrepresenting my plans.

I’m impressed even now with my son’s fealty to the written word, particularly when I compare it to how casually I treat words. And I thought of him today when I read about the Twitter libel suits.

I’m apparently not the only one who has forgotten the power of the pen, or in the Twitter case, the text message. Words carry heft and have meaning. Writing them down and broadcasting them has consequences. The woman paid over $400,000 dollars after she tweeted a rant about a woman’s business.

God talks about writing throughout the Bible, telling people at least 80 times to write something down.  God directs Moses to write down words on his behalf. “Word” itself appears over 950 times. 1 John talks about Jesus as “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

I need to pay more attention to what I write down. I need to believe the words I write and stand behind them. Stargazer was right. If I wrote it down, it behooved me to do it.