~ Journaling ~
Let me ask you some questions:
1. Does your spiritual life have focus?
2. Are your prayers targeted?
3. Is your meditation truly productive?
4. Does your Bible reading produce spiritual creativity and lasting content?
5. As painful as is your suffering, does it provide something lasting of a redemptive nature?
6. Are you honest with yourself about specific sins in your life with which you need to deal?
7. Do you really humbly admit your humanity or are you grandiose, narcissistic and triumphalist in the way you view yourself?
8. Do you really understand your own self-worth as created in the image of God, knowing that you are redeemed by God's grace? Or do you put yourself down internally and, as a result, have the need to build yourself up, externally, by putting down others?
You may wonder where I got these questions.
I got them out of my own life. These are questions that plagued me from time to time. Perhaps some of them are also relevant to you. It is not that I am not a disciplined person. In fact, I tend to be quite disciplined. Still, there are some loose ends that need to be tidied up in my life. Maybe you share this in common with me.
These are multi-dimensional questions, aren't they? It is not easy to deal with them in simple, straight-forward answers. I would like to say an emphatic "Yes!" to each of them. But if I am honest, I have to say "Yes" and "No." These are the kinds of questions I need to be asking and honestly answering.
One of the best ways I know to wrestle with these honestly is to practice the discipline of journaling.
The older I get I am discovering something about myself. I am discovering that I have very deep idealisms. I really want to be God's person. I really want to function in close harmony with Him. At the same time, the older I get the more inclined I am to have insightful thoughts and great aspirations but find that not many hours, and in some cases minutes after I've had those thoughts, they have evaporated. I am the loser for not having written them down so I can go back, review them, and act with specificity upon them. I find that it is so easy to be drawn toward the trivial, to waste valuable energy and time on activities and thoughts that are several levels below what I am able to accomplish at my best.
The more I think about this, the more I realize that Satan is an expert at drawing us away from what God created us to be by interests that in and of themselves are not negative but certainly are distractions from what God would dream for us to be and do.
C. S. Lewis drives home this point when he has the devil, Screwtape, explain to the junior devil, Wormwood, that the man he is after can be drawn from God by "Nothing."
"Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off....The only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one— the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turning, without milestones, without signposts"
I commend to you the discipline of journaling, that intentional act of writing down on paper that which brings a closure to those high-minded thoughts, prayers and potential actions that so often evaporate into thin air.
I tried to make my own brief definition of journaling. For me, journaling is the art of writing down, in stream of consciousness flow, one's own musings about all of life, recording in a permanent way one's: prayers; reflections on Scripture; significant life events; inner feelings; wrestling thoughts; questions; angers; joys; hopes; answers; and aspired-for actions.
Why then should you and I consider the discipline of journaling? Among the many reasons are these:
First, journaling helps me be honest with myself, with God and with others. No one else is entitled to read my journal. It is my own private property. It is my vehicle to express myself with the utmost of transparency.
Second, journaling helps me focus. Writing things down keeps them from evaporating into the air. I can go back and look at what I have just written. In many situations I am not able to come to conclusions. Journaling enables me to identify what is going on inside of myself, bringing focus to whatever issue or relationship is at stake. It clarifies my thinking.
Third, journaling helps me remember. It is not that I am so forgetful. It is just that I can have so much going on in my mind at one time that my best intentions escape me. I have sat down now and on two or three occasions reread what I wrote two weeks ago. Each time I read what I wrote then, I am reminded of where I was then, what has happened since then and am able to bring to that added dimension of insight.
Fourth, journaling helps me work through problems, bringing some to closure. There are those occasions in which I sit down with my journal and am able to work some matter of deep concern through to the point of closure. Life gets so complex for us, the older we get, that it is difficult to find closure on some matters. Or, in an interesting juxtaposition to that, as we get older, sometimes we come too quickly to closure, becoming arbitrary, brittle, dogmatic, insensitive, quick to draw conclusions. A bit more musing, walking around an issue, in stream of consciousness writing, would enable us to acknowledge the complexity, not to leave the matter forever open but to come to mature closure.
Fifth, journaling helps me be more accountable to God, myself and others. I find it so interesting to go back to something I have written years ago. I amaze myself as I rediscover how God has worked in my life in the past. Decisions I have made, covenants into which I have entered strike me with an almost electric relevance to the present. I am the kind of person that when I get down I really get down. I forget that I have been down before. When I am down now I think that is as low as I could ever possibly get. I read my journal only to discover that there have been moments of even greater despair in the past. I am the kind of person that when I get high I really get high, enthusiastic and excited, only to discover that I have gotten enthusiastic and excited in the past in ways that were not necessarily the best for me. As I reread those journal entries I realize that life, most of it, is not lived high or low but in the churning of daily events, relationships, issues, fears, doubts, aspirations. God has been there all through these years, walking hand in hand with me, sometimes picking me up and carrying me when I get too discouraged and at times, when I get too far ahead of Him, calling for me to come back, slow down and walk with Him. I need the accountability of history. As that great old statement goes: "Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." The same goes for our own spiritual lives.
I urge you, if you have journaled in the past and have quit, to take up the practice again. I think all you need is a gentle word of encouragement. However, if you have never journaled, you will probably need more than a gentle nudge. Decide right now that you are going to go out and buy the materials necessary to begin what, for you, will be one of the most exciting practices of your life. Let me suggest that you purchase a reasonably sized, loose-leaf notebook with paper upon which you find it appealing to write. You may want one of those fancy journals, already nicely bound. I also suggest that you write in it with a pen. You may be heavy into computers. Blogs to a certain extent are a fantastic tool but they are not a Journal. You simply can not put down those things that you fear others might read therefore you will not address vital issues in your life. Stick with the pen and paper for this. But make certain you are able to do it in the most remote places in which you will find yourself. You very well may find yourself up into the High Sierras or down to the beach, and dragging a laptop with you just isn't going to cut it. Again, I suggest that you stick with a notebook and a pen.
A spiritual journal is going to contain things that you don't want anyone else but the Lord to see. That's why I suggest a notebook and pen. But do it whatever way works for you. Just do it, and do it regularly. Please don't do it legalistically. You may go days without writing. It is not a daily diary. Or you may write in it two or three times on a given day. Journaling is not just one more spiritual discipline that you somehow have to do to win God's favor. Not for a moment! This is a privileged opportunity to express yourself to yourself and to communicate in a two-way communication with God.
So put down the date, day of the week, and maybe the time of day and start writing. Let your thoughts flow. Muse deeply about anything and everything that comes to your mind. Be very specific with your prayers of adoration, confessions, thanksgiving, intercession, and petitions. Make your prayer list of requests and record wherein those requests are answered. Write about those events of the day that seem significant to you. Record your feelings. Wrestle honestly with those thoughts, those questions, those doubts, those fears, those angers, those hopes, those joys that are part of your experience. Be honest with yourself, and be honest with God. If you are mad at God, tell Him. If you are grateful to Him, express that. If your questions remain open ended, leave them that way. But if you have come to some conclusion and have some answers, write those down. If, in the process of writing, you aspire to specific actions, note those. Occasionally I will quote a passage of Scripture that has spoken to me, and I will write about that.
The core of everything I write is that word from Psalm 19:14,
"May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer."
The cutting edge of my journaling is to push myself, as one who tends to be a thinker, to express my feelings. For a person who tends to be a feeler, the cutting edge for you may be to express your thinking. The ultimate goal of our journaling is to capture in writing both our thoughts and our feelings, to encourage us to be all that God created us to be.
I write about my angers and fears and hurts, depressions and disappointments and anxieties, my joys and thanksgivings... In short, I set down the feelings, and events that have mattered to me, high moments and low...
The journal is like a little island of solid rock on which one can stand and see the waves and storms for what they really are. I can not urge you enough to get into this practice of the art of journaling.
Over the course of the next several days we will look at several different ways of journaling that I hope will help you to get started on a life long practice of writing down your thoughts. These will be done in a sort of question & answer format and are not intended to be rushed through.
With that said ..
Find a quiet place, grab a beverage, take a deep breath and let's begin with the 8 Questions listed at the beginning of this. ...
~ L ~
