Journaling

I started my first diary when I was 12, at the suggestion of someone at church. We were moving to France, I was about to be a teenager--what better time to start recording my life? I would have loved to show you my beat up diary with a teddy bear on the cover, but it is in a bin with a good chunk of my other journals, buried under a stack of other (heavy) boxes. About half of my entries ran something like this: "We had potato soup and cheese for supper. It was good." The other half were about a boy who liked me and the silly, mushy letters he kept sending me. As a matter of fact, maybe I should dig it out just to read some of those letters again! :) Then, over the years, I filled several volumes with more boy entries, none of whom wrote me mushy letters. Isn't that the way it goes? But the entries I really cherish are the ones I started after I met God at the age of 16. I kept track of what God was saying to me, through the Bible, through others, through my experiences. Those are the REAL journals, the ones where I recorded what was important. I have kept the habit of recording what's important to me, maybe not as regularly as some do, but I figure an irregular record is still better then nothing.  You can see by the picture above that I like all different types of  journals.

 And below are some photos of my most recent journal, which is mostly about being a mommy. I record things the kids do or say that I want to remember, but I also write about my life so that Lily (or Ian) can read it later and know that I struggled with the same things they do. Maybe they'll cut me some slack for the ways I mess up, too. :)

Anyway, I say all that to introduce our craft this month. We'll be making journals from cool paper, and I'll tell you more about that at our next meeting. But I wanted you to already be thinking about what you will do with that pretty journal. As you may have already noticed, I have links to some journaling prompts over to the left. You might look through those to get some ideas.

So whether you want to use your journal for just jotting things down, for recording your prayers, for keeping track of your kids' cute sayings or for something else entirely, it's yours, and it's there to be used. Don't let the pretty paper intimidate you into letting sit in a drawer unused.