Journaling to Healing

I reached the 100,000 word count mark in my Word document journal yesterday. A full-length book.

I started the journaling process shortly before the divorce and have kept it up for almost four years now.

It’s messy with lots of stream of consciousness writing.

It’s real.

It’s raw.

But it was, and still is, the means of clearing my head – figuring out who I am after all the years of being who others thought I should be; asking why; committing to trusting God; chronicling the joys, the pain, and God’s hand moving.

And each time I read back over the entries, I see the journey of a woman being taken from brokenness and insecurity to strength and confidence, brought about by the almost imperceptible movements of God in these past four years.

Changes that, if I hadn’t journaled, would likely be forgotten now. The act of writing and then reading over and over have, instead, seared those movements into my mind and built my faith.

I highly recommend adding the practice of journaling, whether experiencing smooth-sailing or stormy times.

Each entry can be as short or as long as you like – the goal is to simply get the thoughts onto paper. Take a moment every once in a while to reread what has been jotted down.

There is no formula for how to journal. Sometimes my entries start off emotionally charged and wander into many directions. Others start with praising God for how He answered in a situation. The only thing I did keep consistent was to end most entries, no matter how I felt, with thanks to God for how He had answered a prayer or thanking Him for how He was going to work out an issue still ahead.

If you have made journaling a regular part of your life, I’d love to hear how helpful you found it to be. If this idea is new to you and you want to give it a try, let me know how it goes.

I will leave you with this quote – “We have nothing to fear for the future, except as we shall forget the way the Lord has led us, and His teaching in our past history”.

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