How To Journal

When I have spoken in public on "journaling," I have found that people are intensely interested and have many questions. Their initial curiosity tends to centre on technique more than anything else. What does your journal look like? How often do you write in it? What sorts of things do you include? Isn't it really just a diary? Do you let your wife read your journal? Although I am by no means an expert journal keeper, I endeavor to answer as best I can.

For many years my journals were simple spiral-bound notebooks that I purchased at an office-supply store. They were rather unimpressive in appearance. I was able to fill one of them with about three months of writing. Many years later, in the age of personal computers, I began to write my journal to a disk. Now when I finish a month of writing, I print out the pages, accumulate them until I have about two hundred pages and then take them to a place like Staples or Office Depot where they spiral-bind them and give them an attractive cover. I write in my journal almost every day, but I am not overly concerned if an occasional day passes without an entry. I have made it a habit to write in the earliest moments of my time of spiritual exercise, and for me that means the first thing in the morning.

So what might you find in my journal? An account of things that I accomplished in the preceding day, people I met, things I learned, feelings I experienced, and impressions I believe God wanted me to have.

In days past, I wrote of our children as they grew up in our home. The stories of their athletic activities, their first dates, when they got their driver's licenses, the various graduations: they're all there. Our intimate conversations, my dreams and worries about them, my unbounded delight in their growth in character: that's there too. And now the journals say a lot about grandchildren who have come along to bless my life.

As I said before, I include prayers if I feel like writing them down, insights that come from reading the Bible and other spiritual literature, and concerns I have about my own personal behavior. I love to record things I am seeing in the lives of members of my family. I anticipate that someday our children and grandchildren will read through some of these journals, and if I can posthumously affirm them for things I see in their growing lives today, it will be a treasure for them.

All of this is part of listening to God. As I write, I am aware that what I am writing may actually be what God wants to tell me. I dare to presume that His Spirit is often operative in the things I am choosing to think about and record. And it becomes important to search my heart to see what conclusions He may be engendering, what matters He wishes to remind me about, what themes He hopes to stamp upon my private world.

Occasionally someone asks, "What would an entry in your journal sound like?" I'm not overly comfortable opening up my journal for others to examine. Many of its pages are rather private, you understand. But I did look through my most recent journal writings and came up with this sample for those who are constructively curious.

I find myself dreading the 6 a.m. news each morning because the world is in such terrible shape right now. I think back two years ago when we dared to dream that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict just might be headed toward resolution. But today! I can hardly remember any moment when things have been worse, when the two sides hated each other more. What a terrible, terrible waste of human life. An entire generation of children and young people being raised to hate. Please, Father: divine intervention!

My Bible reading this morning is from Matthew 6. The first half of the chapter focuses on giving and praying. All to be done, basically, in secret. Nothing designed to impress anybody. Clearly, Jesus is disturbed by the tendency then (and now?) to make a big deal out of these religious disciplines so that the effort becomes something intended to impress people more than to align one's heart with God.

"Be careful not to do your `acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them." I've been thinking while reading this about our habit of self-analysis, something a tad different from self-examination. Not only are we tempted to "perform" for others, but we sometimes perform for ourselves. Even as I pray, for example, I sometimes find myself analyzing the quality of my own prayer. Does it sound "saintly" enough? Could I have said it better?

Even as I give or serve, I sometimes find myself watching and critiquing myself, wondering how it comes across to others. Such is the complexity of spiritual life, the garbledness of so much we do. I'm challenged once again to assure that my motives and purposes are examined for unsoundness.

I must be sure that Gail knows how much I appreciate her attentiveness to me over the last few days. We have had some wonderful laughs together. Yesterday we spent a couple of hours cleaning up winter debris in the front field. She raked, and I put the leaves and sticks through the chipper. Now Gail has plenty of stuff for her mulching operation. She was delighted. Not hard to make her happy. This year I'm committed to liking yard work more.

My journal also becomes a repository of quotes and insights that come from my Bible reading and the books. I am going through at the time. If a comment by an author stands out, I like to copy it into the journal (in boldface) so that the very exercise of typing it out stamps it more deeply into my mind. It is a fascinating experience to occasionally page back through a journal from a year or two ago and see all the thoughts that I'd place in there that were influencing me at that moment. Thumbing through my most recent journal I find a stirring excerpt from Peter Alexander's biography of' Alan Paton, the great South African author. Speaking of' the critical moment in Paton's life when he saw with clarity the horror of apartheid and his own sense of call to fight it, Alexander wrote:

Finding a way to reconcile (black nationalists and Afrikaners) was to be the task of Paton's life, and it was during the war that he dedicated himself to it. The prize for success would be the peace of his country; the price of failure he would not even contemplate. The task might prove impossible, but he was going to give his whole heart to it.

My journals are not heavy with merely serious spiritual reflections or intellectual musings. They are also a place where I enjoy recording the light things of life.

The baseball season has started today, and the Red Sox have lost their first game to Toronto. Pedro Martinez was humiliated for 7 or 8 runs and an unthinkable number of hits. The NCAA championship game was played last evening, and Gail and I sat up and watched it. Maryland over Indiana! And, believe it or not, the Patriots have begun early season workouts. Do I have to start worrying about defending the Super Bowl championship this soon? So the world plays while the Middle East heats up and unravels.

The pile of these journals (now in the many dozens) continues to grow. Fearful that they might get lost if there was ever a fire in our home, Gail went out and purchased a fireproof safe so that these volumes that she and I have kept (Gail is also a journaler) will survive a disaster.

Does Gail read my journals? I suppose she has occasionally taken a look. After forty years of marriage, I really couldn't care less. Our relationship is quite intimate enough that there is little in there that would surprise her now.

To those who are concerned about a potential lack of privacy in such matters, I suggest that they simply find a place where the journal could be locked up and kept from those you would rather not have see inside. If confidentiality is important, you should be able to find a way to maintain it. Concern for privacy is not an adequate reason for not attempting a journal.

Journal keeping becomes a habit for most people if they will stick with it for the better part of a year. Most people quit too quickly, never achieving the habit pattern, and that is unfortunate.

I am careful to keep a journal even when I am traveling. It helps me to maintain a record of those I have met, so that when I return again to places where I have visited, I can simply review my previous visit in the journal and pick up relationships where they may have been suspended due to distance.

Since I first wrote about journaling, it has been fascinating to me to see how many people have written books about the subject. One could probably go to any religious bookstore and find several dozen books about keeping a journal. When I have leafed through some of them, I've been disappointed with those who tried to reduce this effort - as in a lot of spiritual disciplines - to systems and gimmickry. But on the other hand, the proliferation of literature on journaling suggests that more and more people are seeking a way to gain perspective and meaning on lives caught up in a torrent of demands, noises, and distractions. If a journal can help to give shape to a quiet period in one's daily life, then let it be so.

Looking back on my thirty-five years of journaling, I can tell you that establishing the discipline was among the most important decisions of my life. I have a record of the faithfulness of God, the greatest and the darkest moments of my life, the story of my family and my friends, the tidbits from innumerable books. The dozens of journals that sit in that safe are wealth to me.

My mind goes back to Howard Rutledge in his prison camp. Every voice was a hostile one; every noise introduced the possibility of something about to go wrong. In such an ugly place, was there a friendly voice, a lovely sound to be heard anywhere? Yes, if you have trained your ears to hear in the inner garden. There the greatest of all sounds may be heard: those belonging to Him who seeks our companionship and growth. In the words of an old and very sentimental hymn:

He speaks, and the sounds of his voice

Is so sweet the birds hush their singing

(C. Austin Miles, “In The Garden”)

Extracted from Gordon MacDonald's Ordering Your Private World