Journaling Gives You a Place to Process Life, God, People and the World

Journaling affords us a place to process all that goes on around us. No one intrinsically understands everything that goes on around them fully; it takes work to comprehend the nature of our lives, our experience, and our relationships well. That work can take a variety of forms.

Face it, you don't know what you tell everyone you know. You're not even sure that you're doing the right thing most of the time, and if you are, then you question yourself as to why anyone would follow you. We don't understand the way things work, but God does.

There is a quote here that seems pertinent whose authorship is indeterminable:

"Our thoughts untangle themselves as they pass over the lips and through the fingertips."

What it means is this: oftentimes it is necessary to take the jumble of information, emotions, and plans and process them in a way that will help us to untangle the mess that they can become and make our lives clearer and more manageable. We can't take in the information presented to us in our lives in an organized way. Instead we acquire a constantly building stream of indiscernible feelings, thoughts, and data. In order for it all to process and fit into the right folders in our brains, two useful options are given to us: we can talk it out, or we can write it out in a journal.

The topics that we need to process in our journals can run the gamut from spiritual things to how best to get our projects done. Our lives are not split into two hemispheres of secular and sacred. Everything that we experience falls into the category of life, whether our relationship with God or our relationship with our girlfriend or spouse. Our decisions at work, at church, and at home all fall into the same realms. This is true for teenagers and children with their schooling as well, though they would never admit it.

Use your journal to put two and two together and draw connections between the different areas of your life. Make observations about the people around you, about the direction your life is taking, and about God and the world. Try to understand why things are the way they are, and to apply what you do understand from your journal to new relationships and new decisions.

Tips for processing life through your journal:

Be purposeful. When you sit down to write in your journal, have a plan. Determine in your own mind that today you are going to write about an issue with a colleague at work. Choose to spend your journaling time thinking about the things in your life that you are happy with, or even unhappy. Try to write down all of the characteristics you know about God, or draw a conclusion about the world from Scripture.

Be thorough. Try to look at your life from every possible point of view. Imagine how an event looked from the point of view of a friend, and try to see how or why she became offended at your actions. Imagine what would have happened if you had done something differently. Would the outcome have been positive or negative? Try to see every aspect as it is.

Be observant. All people are somewhat blind to their own actions at times, but we can see ourselves through the mirror of another person. Notice people's reactions to that thing you said at lunch. Notice how much more work you get done when you have eaten recently. Notice how much more likely you are to spend time reading the Bible when you know what you're going to do.

Be pliable. Processing all of these things and writing them in a journal is only useful if they truly allow you to see things clearly, and if you are willing to change your modus operandi to suit. Learn from your mistakes; don't keep making them over and over again. Listen to the observations that you make about yourself, about God, about people and the world, and learn what works and what doesn't, so that you can become a more effective person.

For more of this series, please read

• Journaling 101: A Tangible Evidence of What God Is Doing in Your Life
• Journaling 101: A Record of Where We've Come From
• Journaling 101: An Outlet For Prayer
• Journaling 101: An Easy Outlet For Self-Evaluation

Also, please check out the Spiritual Growth Home on Mentorship