I journal. It's a prose version of what I use poetry for. I need to process things that happen, things I think, and sometimes the things I want to say, sort of as a dry run. I've been journaling since I was 13 years old. I still have all the old spiral notebooks and once upon a time I would have rushed in after them in a fire. They contained the record of me, of my journey.
I even tried to convert them into a digital version by retyping them into a log of sorts. (This way in case of a fire it would all be backed up!) I got a few journals into this project and stopped. Why? Because I wanted to reach back in time and shake myself! It had the same sort of feeling you might have when you are watching a horror movie, tossing popcorn at the screen telling the girl not to go looking in the dark basement in her skimpy PJ's!
Yeah... so why would I want to save them from a fire if they were full of all my stupid mistakes? Because this is where I learned from those mistakes. It's the before and after snapshot of all the things I learned.
That's what journals are good for.
Everyone has their own way of doing it. For me, it goes like this: the first several pages are full of high emotion. I'll describe the situation I'm going through, how I feel about it, what other people have said, what I fear, what I hope, my hurts and disappointments... all of it. Most often it's done with tear stains, scribbled out parts, underlining, doodles while I collect my thoughts, whatever is inside my head gets dumped onto the page. Sometimes I'll take a break there, give myself time to shake off the last of the strong emotion and I'll grab my bible.
When I come back to it, I'll reread what I've written. If I'm lucky I'll recognize where I am just being over the top with the feelings, because I've given myself permission to blow. Some of them aren't based in fact, but previous things that make me feel now like I did then. When I pick up the threads of those feelings and trace them back I can see if they really belong to me or not. (Raise your hand if you've ever carried around guilt for someone else's actions or inaction.) If not, then I ask the Lord to help me unknot them and let them go, they belong to someone else. Sometimes those feelings I've traced back from the past are because of harm I've done while hurt or angry, and I need to ask those I've wronged for forgiveness so that I can untie the knots and let them go too.
Sometimes those threads I've identified are tied to current issues, relationships and sins that need to be dealt with now. The process is the same for now as it is for stuff from the past: Submitting it to the Lord.
If I can trace those issues to actionable items, I build a plan for dealing with it. Most often it means I am asking for or granting forgiveness. Sometimes it means that I am giving other people grace for not living up to my expectations. But in both cases, it involves the work of the Holy Spirit. My journal is also a record of prayer, asking God to change me, to help me see the world through His eyes.
Because I screw it up so bad when left to myself.
Without His grace and mercy, I get caught up in getting justice and my perceived understanding of fairness. Without the Holy Spirit's intervention into my journal/prayer-life, my entries look like laundry lists of anger and a record-keeping of wrongs and offenses done to me so that I can justify my own bad behavior.
With the work of the Holy Spirit, then I see those wrongs from a totally different perspective than my own. When I can let go of the feelings that tie me to the moment, I can look at the big picture or behind the actions to the why of a thing.
It doesn't always change the circumstances, but it changes me. Those focused prayers, when I am submitted to the Holy Spirit, enable me to see the truth in a situation and react off of that instead of the feeling that rode me when I entered into the journal/prayer time.
Feelings are good for getting a temperature of what's going on in your heart, but feelings aren't always true. Journaling is good for examining those emotions. Journaling helps clear the truth from the feeling. But the most important thing journaling does for me is that it allows me to talk to God. He gives me room to pour out the stuff that's circling in my head, and because he's a real person to me I feel heard. He cares about me and my day. He wants me to lay down the heavy stuff beside Him so that he can replace it with joy, assurance, compassion, patience... whatever it is that I need.
Sometimes, I get spanked. Sometimes He reveals to me that I am operating from the sinful side of my nature and if I want the good stuff He has for me, I have to be willing to let go of my righteous anger. I have to get over myself and give Him time to confront and deal with those other people in His timing and not what suits me. I have to give them room and time to mature at their own pace and not put up stumbling blocks that make it harder for them to come to God on their own. It means, I have to pray for them, love them and actively look for ways to do good for them. Because that's what He's done for me when I didn't deserve it.
Grace and mercy. It keeps coming back to that doesn't it?
Soul mining, the act of digging up the dirt, rocks and metals in our life - if we do it right, creates a well for the Holy Spirit to seep into your life. It's the Living Water that Jesus was talking about to the Samaritan woman in the gospels. The better you get at digging up the self-protecting and self-serving part of your nature, the deeper your well and the sweeter the water of the Holy Spirit.
It's hard work though. Especially if you like to be right. If you like to have it all under control and someone has to take the blame or responsibility for how you feel. It's humiliating to keep digging up the same stupid rocks over and over again. After a while you just feel covered in mud and the temptation is to sling it at anyone else. That's human, sinful nature that is common to us all.
Aren't you glad that He doesn't leave us there? My daughter Megan has been using the phrase (is it a popular one these days?) to "go die in a hole". I always cringe at it, but in my mind it makes me think of the scripture in Jeremiah 4:13 where it says
"My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."
Trust me, we all have a back yards full of broken cisterns. They come in all shapes and sizes, from our for emergency candy stashes for those stress full days to the savings or retirement account, you hear what I'm saying? Any time we rely on other things instead of God, we fill cisterns with our own resources, and store them for rainy days. Hoping for the rainy days actually, because that's they only way those cisterns fill, they don't go deep and and when it's gone it's gone. It makes us careful in who we share those resources with, doesn't it?
Also, it has a by-product of deceiving us in to thinking that those rainy days of abundance are signs of God's favor, when it may not be true. Good and bad fall on all of us. That kind of water shouldn't be confused with the Living Water God talks about in scripture. It's one of the reasons it's so hard for the rich to enter heaven (no need for God's abundance when they have such deep personal resources) and why money is the root of all kinds of evil. Not that planning ahead or having resources to draw from are bad, only when you do that INSTEAD of digging the well. But I digress...
If you have dug deep, and the resources are endless, it makes you want to pitch a tent for shade and invite the neighbors over, doesn't it?
The point is that we all do the digging, it's life. We are all in the mud and we all have to deal with the sin that so easily ensnares. The real question is where do you dig, and what are you digging for?
Journaling is my shovel. What's yours?
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