A friend and I recently taught a workshop at a weekend women's retreat. The topic? Journaling.

What's your gut response to the mention of the practice of journaling? You likely think either "yuck" or "cool"—but not somewhere in-between.

That's because very few people feel neutral about it; and I'm not sure why. Journaling allows you to know yourself a bit better—and much more. As a spiritual (rather than merely psychological) practice, journaling is not just about our self, but our self in relationship to God.

"Self-knowledge that is pursued apart from knowing our identity in relationship to God easily leads to self-inflation," writes David Benner in his wonderful book, The Gift of Being Yourself. "Unless we spend as much time looking at God as we spend looking at our self, our knowing of our self will simply draw us further and further into an abyss of self-fixation."

Self-absorbed people are those who seem to get stuck, trying to figure out themselves, their motivations and ...