The Value of Keeping a Journal

Thinking today about the importance of telling my own story as it's happening, instead of retroactively. There's something useful about that, I think. Not knowing how the story will end, but telling it anyway.

I've been a nearly lifelong journaler, though not with any sort of rigorous discipline. I do it when I feel like it. Sometimes I write two days in a row. Sometimes a week goes by. Sometimes a year. Somehow I've managed to fill several volumes over the years. These are the ones I've managed to preserve.

In the green box at the top of the heap are my earliest scratchings when I was an angst-filled, love-starved teenager. I didn't have a fancy book with a built-in ribbon bookmark back then. It was simply lined paper ripped from a spiral notebook in which I also did homework, folded up, and tucked away some place where no one would find it.

I don't know how they survived intact and unread all these years, but I found them this morning, stuffed in a storage bin in my closet, the breathings of my 17 year old heart, and I read them for the first time in nearly 20 years. When I plucked a random folded paper from the box, unfolded it, read my old bubbly script, tried to recall my world, my circumstances, and my heart, I cringed, as you might imagine.

It was painful to see how confused I was about the world, how obsessed I was with trying to figure out what would make me happiest, and especially, how far I was from God.

I was headed down what, I am confident now in saying, was a path to destruction. I was dating a boy I had no business going out with, probably as an act of rebellion against my parents, who I was sure were disappointed in me, and who, I frequently admitted in my writing, had no reason to be proud of me. It was also a rebellion against my sister, who had been doing things right, and was about to be married to a wonderful man.

I suppose you could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy. A head-first dive into a whirlpool in which I would be sucked voluntarily into a downward spiral. My shame in my poor decisions was compounded by each deliberate step I took down that path. And when shame doesn't result in repentance, it turns into something altogether different: contempt, anger, haughtiness, and pride.

I wrote many rambling pages before and during my relationship with this boy, justifying, rationalizing, and explaining why it was okay. Despite the youthful bluster, there is a sadness in my writing. A reigning cluelessness, a desperation to avoid pain and regret.

I spent a lot of time thinking (I had forgotten this) about moving out of my parents' house before I graduated. I had a job, after all (in 1997 minimum wage was about $5.15 an hour). And the people I had been hanging around--the family of this boy--were my picture of what this life looked like, which, in a word, was poverty.

But I didn't care. I wanted to be independent. I wanted to be away from my parents. I didn't see it at the time, but now I recognize that what I really desired was to be done feeling ashamed, which I felt every time they looked at me, or tried to talk to me.

That was a powerful longing, but there was a still more powerful being at work in me, and I didn't even know it.

I broke up with the boy before summer was over, though I feared he would probably never talk to me again (he didn't). I wrote on one of these folded up papers, "I don't know what changed. I just see things differently now."

That chapter ended--just like that. The page was turned and a new chapter began. Within a year I would be far away from that town and that life, studying for a teaching degree, and reconciled to my parents. I didn't pull myself out of that pit by my own maturity, wisdom, clarity, or strength. I had none of that. I was dragged out by my collar with a mighty hand, unwitting and unwilling, by a God who had already ordained my eventual salvation.

It would be another 6 years, a college education, a husband, a teaching position, and a child, before I would be converted. But the work was begun during that awful time of rebellion. My journaling revealed that to me.

God saved me by his restraining grace and I didn't even want it at the time. He took me off that path of destruction and set me on a path that will ultimately culminate in righteousness, and I can take no credit for it.

How I thanked him this morning when I read those cringe-inducing words of my youth. How grateful I am that he prompted me to write them down, even while I was in the pit, with no desire to get out of it, so that I could, 20 years later, sit on the floor of my closet, with tears in my eyes, praising him for the good work he began in me so long ago.

That's why I spend my days writing and editing a fictional story for young adults. It's why my heroine is 17 years old, why her heart churns with the same dangerous concoction of pride and shame that mine did so many years ago. It's why she teeters on the edge of a family that expects more of her, and comes dangerously close to missing out on sharing their great destiny.

This story is my witness to the world, in the way I know best how to communicate. It's my testimony to the faithfulness of God, my response to his saving grace.

Where would I be if he hadn't pulled me from that path of destruction?

Where would any of us be?

What's your story?

How are you sharing it?

On Diligence

Thinking today about how diligence goes hand-in-hand with contentment. And the idea that contentment does not mean having everything I need or desire.

Paul, through Christ's enabling, was content, even when his needs weren't met. That's what Philippians 4:13, everyone's favorite verse, is really about.

"I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength."

People latch onto these words for the wrong reasons, I think. They want it to mean they'll succeed at their task, accomplish something great, finish something hard, overcome something big, or build something with their own strength.

But I don't think that's where Paul was going with these words.

He was in prison, facing death, uncomfortable, probably hungry, as miserable as a human being could be. Yet he was content--why? Because in that moment he was being diligent at the task he loved. He was laboring as he should. Praying, working, writing, chipping away at a monumental, impossible job.

There was no indication that he would succeed. Quite the opposite. He was suffering, and he was writing to people who were likely to suffer as well. Success, they way the world defines it, was not a condition for him. That's so important for me to get. I have said the words (how I cringe to think of them), "If I only knew he would cause my stories to be published, I would work so hard at this and not worry about my work, my time, my energy, my life, being wasted."

Do you see what I did there? I made publication, or success, as the world defines it for an aspiring writer, my condition.

I have worked halfheartedly, even hidden my work, because if it's not God's will to bring it to fruition, I will be embarrassed for having tried. So I have not been diligent. I have not been content. I have languished over the question of whether or not I should even be doing this.

How awful would it have been for Paul to do the same? Maybe that's not a fair question to ask. Paul's gifting, calling, and labor were not the same as mine. But if I can learn contentedness from him, perhaps I can learn unhesitating diligence too.

Perhaps his life and work can show me that diligence is the seed in which contentedness germinates.

Diligence when no one is looking. When no one seems to care. When no paycheck is forthcoming. When it seems, by the world's standards, to be a fruitless labor.

Only then will I look up from the screen at the end of a long work day, and say with Paul, "I know the secret." Whether men praise me or not, pay me or not, mock me or not, understand me or not.

I am content.

Content to submit. Content to work. Content to wait. Content in his providence. Content with the journey. Content to learn what he has for me right now, knowing that the temptations of "affliction and want" are easier to manage than those of "fullness and prosperity," as Matthew Henry says about this verse.

I can do this only because of Christ, who gives me the strength, not to succeed, but to be content.