The Happy Discipline of Journal-Keeping

May 15, 2010 was my last day of high school and the first day I began cultivating one of the most rewarding disciplines I know of: journaling.

There was a time when keeping a journal or a diary was commonplace. They were kept by such luminaries as Lewis and Clark, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winston Churchill, and most U.S. presidents. The daily entries of these greats have served both as historical records of major world events and as intimate glimpses into the lives of some of the world’s most interesting people.

Journaling is not just for famous people, though. Chances are good that your grandparents or great-grandparents kept one. My great-grandmother did. I remember seeing her little dollar store diary with its metal clasp laying on her end table whenever I went to her home. It was only when she passed away that I learned her practice of keeping a daily diary extended well beyond her senior years--it began in 1937!

At the end of each diary, Grandma wrote down highlights of that year and typed those entries out on her typewriter. When she passed away, each of her children’s families received a copy of those entries. It’s been so fun to read of her life from the 1930s and ‘40s, when she was raising her three boys, all the way up to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My name even appears in a few entries.

As for me, I am now on my tenth journal. I’ve never paid much for one, and the one I’m currently using is probably the least expensive of them all--a Moleskine look-alike from Walmart. The pages of these journals, though, are invaluable. They record the days of my life, and the discipline of writing nearly every day has been a joy.

You’ll notice that I refer to journaling as a discipline. I say that, because it is. Cultivating a discipline is to “train oneself to do something in a controlled and habitual way”. It takes work, because it takes time and requires a person to submit themselves to a new regimen. But you’ll also notice that I refer to journal-keeping as a joy. Here are a few of the joyful benefits of keeping a journal...

1.) It provides an outlet for thoughts, ideas, and emotions. There are certainly other good ways to do this, such as art, music, athletics, etc.; but I find that putting what is in my mind down on paper is a great way to sort things out, to determine what I really think about something, to express grief or happiness, or even just to record ideas before bed, so I don’t have to think about them all night.

2.) It’s a helpful reference. I have not written every day of the past 9 years, but I have more often than not. Doing so has helped greatly, on a practical level, because it enables me to go back and confirm when various events, such as births and deaths, meetings and phone calls took place. It can also be fun to pull an old journal off the shelf, look up today’s date, and see what I was doing that day a year, or years, before. Think of it as a more intimate version of Facebook’s “memories” feature.

3.) It’s a record of you. Keeping a journal, especially a daily journal, is essentially maintaining a record of yourself, especially when used to write about your spiritual life. On numerous occasions, as I have read entries from my past, I have been convicted by how close to the Lord I was at that time, or conversely, how much I had grown in my understanding and experience of Him since then.

These records (plural, because you’ll fill several notebooks in your lifetime, if you do it right) are fun to read later on in life, despite the embarrassment they’ll occasionally bring, and they’ll certainly be a delight to your children and grandchildren one day.

4.) It’s a record of God’s faithfulness. Using your journal to record prayers is an excellent practice. On several occasions, I have written prayers, then moved on with my day, only to revisit what I wrote several days later and find that the Lord had answered my prayers in unexpected ways. We can become so engrossed in asking for things of the Lord that we forget to thank Him for how He has provided. A journal, when you read it some time later, is a good praise prompter.

So here’s my challenge to you: today, go to the dollar store, Walmart, Barnes & Noble, wherever, and buy yourself a journal. Put it on your nightstand or by the recliner, and don’t go to bed tonight before you write a few lines of what the day was like, how the Lord is working in your life, or a combination of things, then put it down. Tomorrow, do the same thing.

​Sure, it’s a discipline that requires work (and remembering!); but before you know it, it will be a habit you can’t imagine not indulging.

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