The Journey of Journaling

Journaling is like free counseling for your relationships. To the degree that journaling helps us ferret out the negative, destructive voices in our souls, it will only help our relationships. When we bring our hearts to God on paper and spill out our souls before him, it will impact every relationship we have. If we are learning from our lives by listening, responding, and letting God direct us, every special person in our lives will reap incredible benefits.

For example, many times after a conflict, my journal is a place where I conduct the interview. As I am fuming or crying, I need a place to process. I begin to write over and over how wrong I felt someone was, how it went, how mad she made me, how I don't plan to forgive her, and on the twelfth time, I see plain as day how wrong I was. I peel back another layer and write about what I did and perhaps why I did it. Sometimes I have to ask God to show me why I said what I did or did what I did. If I don't wrestle it out in my journal, I can easily miss what I did wrong or, more significantly, the reason I did it. The latter is what I am after. For me to see and understand what I did is pretty critical to it not happening again (at least not in the next twenty-four hours!)

God has access to my heart through my journal. He meets me in the midst of my writing, and he teaches me about relationships. It is in my journal that I wrestle with issues of forgiveness. It is in my writing time that I pray for those I love. God brings things to my mind that I can pray for. Journaling is a structured way to pray for your loves ones, and we know that when we begin to pray, God does amazing things.