Mapping Your Private World
Journaling: a tool to bring your soul into focus.
Gordon MacDonald
July 1, 2004
On December 17, 1968, I wrote the following words on page one of a spiral-bound, college-ruled notebook: "With some hesitation I begin the lifelong task of keeping a personal journal. This effort starts in the final third of my twenty-ninth year. For a long time I carried on an argumentative dialog with myself as to the significance of such an undertaking. It seems presumptuous to think that my life's notes will have any value once I am gone. "Yet perhaps the greatest contribution one might leave for his posterity would be a personal chronicle of real living—unbridled life, unglossed and real to the core." With the benefit of age, I now see youthful pomposity in those words. Later in that entry I wrote: "If just one person could look into the window of my soul and see me for what I really am before God … they would catch a glimpse of several frustrated forces—some good, some bad—fighting for the dominance of my heart. Were it not for the promise of God in Philippians 1:6, I should have doubts regarding the outcome. No one could chart my desperate desire to love Christ. Few would appreciate my hunger to see him break forth in power in my life. Perhaps it is the fate of the Christian never to be satisfied with the status quo."   |  |
Bottom line: don't journal if you want to evade the truth.
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Now, 36 years later, there are two Home Depot safes, fireproof, that protect the journals I have filled attempting to make sense of my journey through 65 years of life. Keeping a log may be nearly as old as the history of writing itself. There is a drive within the human heart to memorialize, to preserve, to explain, to articulate dreams. Beyond that we may need simply to remember what life was once like and how we got to where we are. When I ...
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