I was talking with one of my newly graduated students recently and she told me that she plans to journal every day for a whole year regarding her experience as a novice nurse.  She is giving a gift to herself.  Never again will she be a novice nurse, and so recording her insights and thoughts on this season of her life will be such an invaluable treasure to her later.

I know it’s strange, but I get super excited when I find out that someone I know journals, or is starting to journal. My bias is that EVERYONE should journal.  It’s just that valuable of a discipline.

Here are the reasons that I journal:

1. We think we’ll remember things that we won’t if we don’t write it down.  I’ve kept a journal since I was 12 or so.  So much of my life’s thoughts, learnings, struggles, and joys would have been lost to my conscious memory had I not recorded these.  It’s fun, for example, to look back now at my thoughts about the impending births of each of our kids.  With each kid, I wrote down my sense of who this child might become, and its been amazing to look back and see how accurate that has been.

2. Unedited writing is a healthy way of processing thoughts and emotions.  When I don’t have to worry about what anyone thinks of my thoughts and emotions, I can freely express myself.  Journaling is cathartic.  I can say things as strongly as I want to, and no one gets offended.  Then, when I have the real conversation, because I’ve had an outlet for the intense emotion, the conversation just goes better.  A friend of mine started journaling about a year ago during a very intense time in her life and recently told me it has made a huge difference in her life as she navigates the pressures of school and family.  She just feels so much better.

3. Answers come through writing. I often write down my questions and don’t try to answer them.  I just leave them there. In writing. Posed before God in hopes of an answer to come one day.  Almost always, if I’m wiling to wait long enough, an answer will come. And then I journal about that, too.

4. Journaling becomes a record of the seasons of our lives.  As you get older, this becomes more valuable. It’s so helpful  to go back to earlier journal entries and see more clearly how I was being processed and developed as a person at various points. Kierkegaard said it like this,

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Without having some way of recording the present, you will not fully learn from the past.

5. As a discipline.  I think its good to have at least one discipline, if not more, that we put into practice and stay with.  While I have had seasons lasting up to a few months during which time I have not journaled once, I have always come back to it.  I think we are better as people when we find something meaningful to do and stick with it.

How about you?  Do you journal?  If so, I’d love to hear one reason why you take the time to journal!