One of the spiritual disciplines with which I am reconnecting during this Lenten season is the discipline of journaling. Interestingly, this blog has functioned as a type of journal for me over the last couple of years (at least insofar as such a public forum can be described as a journal). In recent days, however, the Spirit has drawn me back to a more personal and introspective journaling—a practice that, for me, always involves prayer, meditation upon biblical truth, reflection upon the happenings of my life, and the tangibility of putting actual pen to actual paper.
What is Christian journaling? It is the discipline of writing (or typing) about one’s activities, experiences, thoughts, feelings, and prayers for the purpose of deepening one’s discernment of how it is that God is redemptively and creatively at work in the seemingly common nooks and crannies of one’s daily living.
I have found many different blessings in the practice of journaling:
-Journaling helps me to become obedient to the biblical instruction to “examine yourselves to see whether your are living in the faith” (2 Corinthians 13:5);
-It enables me to clarify my own thoughts and to distinguish between my true feelings and my split-second emotional reactions;
-It brings my hidden sins and ulterior motives to light;
-It helps to purge my potentially destructive emotional energy;
-It strengthens my discernment concerning the purposes of God and the way in which those purposes are fulfilled over time;
-It broadens my perspective on the “big picture” of what life really means;
-It enables me to discern the answering and outcome of my prayers over time;
-It illuminates the evidence of sanctification in my own life;
-It helps me to listen to Scripture more attentively and to encounter it more meaningfully.
Franz Kafka, though not a Christian, articulated very well the urgency of the discipline of journaling for the person who has experienced its potential: “I won’t give up the diary again,” Kafka wrote. “I must hold on here. It is the only place I can.”
Likewise, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of my favorite writers, once captured in a single sentence the spiritual potential represented by the practice of writing: “This is not a pen, it is a prayer. One must have compassion for that.”
The other day, I flipped through the pages of a journal that I kept back in early high school (some 27 years ago). Reading the words written by that insecure, self-absorbed, yet earnestly prayerful fifteen-year-old boy brought to my heart a profound gratitude for the relentlessness of God’s grace and the profundity of God’s patience. The pages of that old journal also afforded to me a refreshing glimpse of a season of my life that remains a crucial part of who I am, though I am now far removed from that season chronologically.
That, I suppose, is why I journal in the first place. I journal because journaling helps me to understand how my past and present are inseparably linked in the timelessness of God’s redemptive providence. I journal because journaling deepens my attentiveness to the nuances of this human pilgrimage, no matter whether those nuances are to be found in a 2009 Cabinet meeting or a 1982 trigonometry class.
I journal, in other words, because journaling, through the Holy Spirit, becomes a means of grace that hones my discernment concerning the passing of time, the connectedness of happenings, and the often-surprising intersection between the eternal and the everyday.
Eric, Your journaling has become an everyday part of my life through this blog. Before I start and before I finish my day I check to see if you have written something new. You make being a Christian fun and give us a very different way at looking at everything we do!
Thank you for being you.
Eric, I know of at least TWO people who have started journaling as a result of your inspiration.