Notes in a Journal

Journaling is a spiritual discipline which may not appeal to everyone.  Certainly, it is not as essential to our spiritual life as the discipline of prayer, or attentiveness to the Word, or worship.  It can, nonetheless, be a powerful means of hearing what God is saying to us through the ordinary moments of our life.  There have been times when I have found myself waking up in the midst of a dream and actually getting up and writing a few notes about the dream lest I wake up with no memory of what I wanted to remember.  Dreams are fleeting and the memory of them is often even more fleeting.     

The notes enabled me to remember and to give some reflective thought later to something which had more importance than just nighttime entertainment.  And, what is true of dreams is also true of ordinary events, conversations with people in the course of a day, or things seen which stirred us.  Writing down some record of these things gives us pause to reflect on what might be there to see which is not seen when we just look at them, or experience them.   

The more we are able to pay attention to what seems to be the ordinary in our life, the more we are going to find ourselves learning to hear the Voice of God in the silence and to know His presence in places and in moments we would have otherwise missed.  It seems that the real value in the discipline of keeping a journal is that it helps us pay attention to what God is about in the world around us and in the spirit within us.  Writing in a journal can become a powerful way of seeing, hearing, and knowing the reality of an ever present God.