Who Are You? A Journey in Journaling

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 problems, their purpose. Journaling pushes the wheels out of the ruts of life; it gets you unstuck. Thoughts and feelings, inscribed in black and white, allow you the opportunity to step back and be objective enough to move forward, make positive changes, and avoid repeating past mistakes.

Journaling is a practice in itself, but also a method for engaging in other practices: worship, prayer, self-examination, confession.

God made us in his image; journaling allows us to look for the good things in us, the things that reflect God’s glory. To know, as Benner says, “our identity in relationship to God.” Just as the Bible is (among other things) a record of the activity of God, meant to encourage us in our faith, so a journal is a place where we can (among other things) record the activity of God in our lives. Looking back through it, we can be encouraged in our faith as we see answers to prayer, or simply realize that we have grown up a bit since we wrote what we did.

And while we are all made in his image, we’re also each uniquely trusted with gifts and talents that God wants us to use to further his kingdom.

Think about your ministry role—hopefully it fits with your gifts, your passions, how God wired you. But if you don’t know your gifts, if you don’t know who God made you to be (in other words, you don’t know yourself), your ability to serve God and the church will remain severely compromised. And one easy way to understand yourself is to keep a journal to write your thoughts, your prayers, and your fears. In the very act of writing, you will discover yourself. Things you don’t expect will flow out when you put a pen to paper.

Journaling can also be a place to listen to God and practice self-examination—which is an honest, God-guided look at your actions and motivations. You can get real honest about your short-comings, and also see where you’re doing well. You can issue an invitation echoing David’s in Psalm 139: “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” (v. 23, 24)

These will prove to be courageous words: words that lead to life and to growth. To intimacy with God. When you invite him to know you, then you create an open door to a deeper relationship. He knows each of us anyway, but our openness to him creates an intimacy that allows us to know him more. And to know him better is to know his love more deeply.

Journaling about what we’ve read in Scripture, or when we’ve seen God at work in our lives, can help us to get to know God and focus on him—a better use of our awareness. Knowing ourselves through journaling won’t do us any good unless we also get to know who God is.

“People who have never developed a deep personal knowing of God will be limited in the depth of their personal knowing of themselves,” Benner writes. “Failing to know God, they will be unable to know themselves, as God is the only context in which their being makes sense.”

Keri Wyatt Kent is an author, speaker, and children’s ministry volunteer. Learn more at www.keriwyattkent.com