Back to basics is the ongoing theme in the next few weeks here on Healthy Spirituality. A good point in time to ask ourselves what are our essential practices and if we are really practicing them?  Often we get rushed, lazy, distracted and forget what best slows us down and aligns our hearts with God.

This week let’s explore keeping a spiritual Journal. This is a popular topic in the Healthy Spirituality community, and I have written much about it in the past. Maybe some of these will inspired your practice. Here are a few of those posts:

• Old Journals – Keep or Destroy
• Lessons Learned from Keeping a Journal more than 43 Years
• Six Beginning Tips for Keeping a Journal
• Harvesting a Spiritual Journal

What is a Spiritual Journal?

A Spiritual Journal is a notebook or some type of recording of your faith journey. The focus is on your relationship with God, how you see life through your spirituality and where you prayerfully think God may be inviting you next in life. 

A spiritual journal is not a diary – where all the nuances of daily life are documented. Significant life events or what is impacting you in ordinary living can be the framework, but the essence of what you write is through the lens of your faith.  How is that event transforming you? What does God want you to learn from this situation? What is most lifegiving at this time?

Joan Chittister calls journals “the x-rays of our souls. They refuse to let us hide from ourselves.”

Why Keep a Spiritual Journal?

Keeping a spiritual journal is a prayer in writing. I collect a variety of words, quotes, insights on those pages, but the majority of my writing expresses my conversations with God.

I see entries in my journal as markers or signposts on my path. Where I was at this particular time?  Writing regularly helps to capture my emotions, thoughts, and prayers that often slip away from my conscious, but linger in my unconscious.

A journal helps me see and hear God in a tangible way. My journal holds my inner thoughts, my reflections on life and my faith walk and becomes my companion on this earthly journey.  Keeping a journal for me is one of the key essential practices in my spirituality.

Here are some other reasons for keeping a journal:

~ Writing helps us to articulate our relationship with God.

~ Gives us a place and process to organize our thoughts. I often see themes emerge as I write.

~ What a safe place to explore our hopes, dreams, fears, joys, and concerns.

~ Provides a record for my insights and great quotes that resonate in my heart.  

~ Keeps prayers and conversations with God we have so they’re not forgotten

~ Creates a time and space on a regular basis to be with God and make some sense of life (sometimes we’re so busy living life that we don’t take time to get perspective)

~ I hear myself in my journal – often our voice is drowned out by the noise of the world and my own internal chattering I miss my true desires and what God is whispering to me.

 ~ Journaling helps me discover myself and know God better. My story within God’s story.

“I begin these pages for myself, in order to think out my own particular pattern of living, my individual balance of life, work, and human relationships.  And since I think best with a pencil in my hand, I started to write.”

Anne Morrow Lindberg

These are just some of the valuable reasons to keep a journal and I know this practice nourishes my soul. 

Do you keep a journal? How has it helped your faith journey?

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