That I am aware of, my wife has never taken notes when she’s come to see me speak. Although she would argue that she’s heard whatever I’m saying a million times because I usually try to just speak what we’re living, I think her gathering a binder full of notes might be in order.

When I was a kid, I remember one pastor’s wife who used to do that. My mom kind of held her up as the gold standard pastor’s wife. She sat in the front row every Sunday morning with an open notebook and a scribbling hand. And my mother, although rapt with attention to hear what my dad was preaching, rarely took notes and I think may have secretly compared herself to that other pastor’s wife down the street.

The challenge is that there’s really not a good system to compare sermon note taking skills. You would think that by this point, Christianity Today would have released some sort of scorecard we could all universally use to grade the quality of our note taking but like so many other things within Christian culture I fear that burden has fallen upon our shoulders. And thus, I give you …

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