Journaling

I wonder what will happen to all the journals I've kept?  I began in the late 70s.  Who would want them? Do I want anyone to read them? Should I destroy them now? Furthermore, is the need to write it all down crazy? Should I give up the habit?

Journals are like first drafts. A writer starts with a blank page and  just puts it all out there, knowing that later it will be refined and edited over and over until the point is clear and the story finished. First drafts are messy. They are meant to be marked up in red, rearranged, struck out and sometimes wadded up for a new start. First drafts, and the subsequent ones, can be discouraging. If you expect to get it all "right" the first try, you will probably give up.

My journal is the first draft of the story of my life, and often even the first draft of a day, a year, a decision, a story.  I want it to be neat and tidy. Organized. Logical. No mark-outs. Beautiful penmanship. I want it to be the finished product. I want it to provide quick answers to off of life's problems and questions.

First drafts of life raise more questions than provide answers. If I "have the mind of Christ" as the Bible says I do, it must be extracted, mined for, developed, listened for, asked for. Even realizing that I want and need the "mind of Christ" is a process.

Like the first draft of a story, writing out problems gets messy - and not just the penmanship. When I share honest feelings, there they are in ink on paper. Sometimes that process is lengthy, spanning years and filling blank books, but rarely am I not rewarded with clarity, resolution, insight, even wisdom from God. Some are profound and others so ordinary that I could mistake them for my own thoughts. When I pick up journal and pen, when I see a blank page, I FEEL the anticipation that God will meet me there. He will speak to me.

It seems I can't really think - process - without writing. Life has to travel from my scattered brain through my fingertips onto to pen and ink to be understood, reasoned, remembered. I don't know what I think until I write it. Thoughts bounce around in my head, giving a feeling of confusion, unrest. Since I learned to guard every word in childhood, journaling offers freedom! I can allow honest words and feelings to flow.

Keeping a journal means sanity for me. It's cheaper than a shrink! What a comfort journaling has been to me, especially when I had no friends or family to share my thoughts with. Even now, having the best of friends, I see that no one can really understand another person's heart - except for the Lord. No one listens like He does. I think of how much I love each of my children. It seems I should be able to get inside of each one's mind and heart - to truly know everything about each one. Surely, I should be the one person who truly understands them because they grew inside my body and because they are part of my heart.  I yearn for that intimacy, but I only get glimpses. Seeing how alone each person really is, I am desperate to truly know and be known by Him. Beginning in Genesis, God made it clear that He desires intimacy with His people. It's all about relationship.

My journal is a way of remembering the Lord and all He has done and is doing in my life. Re-reading always gives me perspective. That perspective often comes even in the embarrassment of how I saw things at the time it was written. The perspective sometimes shows progress. When it doesn't, I ask myself and the Lord, "Why?"  Many times, I see that I never even took the first step of obedience God had shown me! Ouch!  I see how much time has been wasted - yes, even years! Other times, I see that my flesh is still my flesh-just like the Bible said it would be!  I see pettiness. I see how a judged a person. Many times, I've since had a glimpse into what God is doing in that person's life. Many times, my opinion is changed so much that I want to "white-out" all that I wrote before. Even so, I see that God isn't as disheartened by failure or the time I consider wasted as I am. After all, most of my wisdom came though the struggles, mistakes and failures!  As long as I continue walking with Him, I can be assured that He's still working on me.

1 Corinthians 10:5 tells us to "take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ." Jounaling helps me gather up all the loose ends of my thoughts and life and develop skill in listening to the Lord. The wild and loose thoughts that must be taken captive, must first be recognized. What better way to see them clearly is to see them in black and white! Embarassing, yes, but also beneficial. The enemy's ploys are exposed. I now know where to do battle.

If the almighty God actually speaks to us, the least we can do is take every means to remember and to learn from what He says. There may be a better way than journaling, but I haven't found it.
The problem is the "messy mixture": the wheat and tares; the silver and the dross; His ideas and mine.  They must all be sifted through the whole of a life, through many edits and versions.

But, what about all the "extras" in each journal? Lists, resolutions, rants, ideas, good intentions, venting and embarrassing revelations of the state of my own heart? God knows it all anyway.  But have I gained anything from to-do's and goals I rarely accomplish?  Noble ideas and desires that I never succeed in living out?  How could one week's journal entries reflect the majesty and glory of God, yet the pettiness of my flesh and the ordinariness of routine and day-to-day living? That is a mystery perhaps similar to "the outer man is decaying but the inner man is being renewed day by day." (2 Cor.4:16)

So, yes, I am a journaler! Not sure if I can change that. Not sure if I want to. The only question is, what to do with all these journals? Re-reading makes me want to tear out pages, but even seeing the uselessness of some struggles teaches me. I don't want to lose one gem of truth. Even as I read about an issue I wrote about 20 years ago, I may not agree with the conclusion I reached then, but the seeing the process is valuable. It still teaches. Each entry and lesson echoes into my present. What a joy when I can say, "that doesn't apply to me any more." "That has been resolved in my life." What a humbling lesson when I see that something I long ago declared "fixed" has cropped back up, not fixed at all. The best is when when a new insight or application of God's Word appears and changes everything suddenly! I've seen it happen!

I wish I had written more of the sweet things. Simple and complex ones. Quiet peaceful days with my children. Phone conversations and dinners together taken for granted. Details. Cute things the kids said. Laughs shared. I wish I had recorded all the prayer prayed and thanks given. If only, I could have captured all the life lived. I seemed to focus on the problems, not the joys. I think I thought the joys went without saying - that I would always remember them. I regret that. It makes the journals unbalanced. They don't show the whole picture.

"We have this treasure in earthen vessels." (2 Cor. 4:7) The journals are an incomplete and disjointed   rough first draft of snippets of the the story of my life. If I were writing a blog post, they would be wadded up and tossed as the finished product was posted.  I heard somewhere that "God makes your mess your message." I hope that's true!  One day, He will write "The End" to my story. He will throw away all the rough drafts. Somehow, because it's His work and He has done the editing, He will declare it  to be good.

But, what to do with all of these "workbooks"of my life? I haven't figured that one out yet.