Since becoming a mother..or maybe since hitting the big 3-0, I’ve been pondering death…not in a morbid way but in an “Oh my gosh, I’m getting older and before I know it I’ll be thinking about things like menopause and osteoperosis and wrinkles and then my body will hit the dirt…my spirit will rest in Jesus..and sometime after that I’ll stand before God to give an account for what I’ve done with the time He’s alloted me” sort of way.
I can be intense sometimes.
To deal with my not quite mid life crisis, I’ve started recording my life. I take picturesI track my activities in journals: food I eat, times I exercise, pages I write, prayers I send to The Man Upstairs. With journaling, I can get all that mental intensity out of my brain and onto the page. After a few months of this however, it became too cumbersome and disorganized. I’d have pages written in one notebook, more pages written in another notebook. My notebooks haphazardly covered multiple topics: motherhood, prayers, writing exercises etc. Journaling became a messy exercise for me.
So after accepting the fact I’m a left brained, creative person (go figure), I started searching for a journal that’s quick, easy and organized. Last November, I found a way to systemically keep track of all this…life…that passes through my fingers via seconds, minutes, hours, and days. I want to know if I’m growing. Or if I’m still struggling with the same tendencies I had as a flighty teenager…or as a flighty twenty nine year old.
I purchased a five year journal to track my motherhood journey and a ten year journal to track other aspects of my life. Each journal is only four lines so I can record something in a few minutes. The cool thing about multi year journals is when I return to that day’s page next year, I can reread what I wrote in the prior years. For my motherhood journal, I have a five year Mom’s One Line a Day: A Five-Year Memory Book
When I’m feeling more verbose and need to write for more than four lines, I use the following:
*A Family Gratitide Journal
*Personal Prayer Journal
*Writing Journal
I’ll post about those other three journals later this month. What type(s) of journal do you keep? How do you record your sojourning on this earth?
How about mom’s immortality?. If it is written it will last forever, unless, deleted, lost or burned, but it will last beyond your life.
A friend of mine can’t grasp the idea that I have so many journals. It actually makes us both laugh because she’ll try keeping a mental note of all the notebooks in which I write. Then, when she discovers that there’s yet another she didn’t know about she smiles and asks “what’s that one for?” LOL
I currently have four:
– a personal journal (in which I just record thoughts and feelings I’ve had during the day or special things that have happened)
– a dream journal (God gives me visions when I’m awake and when I’m sleeping that have impacted my walk with Him, so now I record everything I “see”.)
– a scripture journal (this is usually what I take to church or when I’m listening to a sermon on TV or radio, or if God just drops something in my spirit)
– a poetry journal
I took a break from my creative writing for a little while, but am in the process of picking that back up…and there are at least three more journals that I have for that. PLUSE I blog! LOL. Some days I have to force myself to interact with other humans! LOL
I like your idea of a Family Gratitude Journal!