I want to address the men of Covenant in particular here. As guys, I think it's easy to write off journaling. Ask yourself: What comes to mind when you hear the word journal? An archive of feelings. A private record of one's deepest darkest secrets. Or do you get a picture in your head of someone writing letters to an imaginary friend named Diary, “Dear Diary….” Well, that’s exactly what I thought from middle school all the way through high school.
At the time, my mom encouraged me to begin journaling because “it’s good for you, it might even make you a better writer,” yet I dismissed this suggestion. At the time, I considered journaling to be boring and excessively emotional.
It wasn’t until I was alone on an island in the boundary waters between Northern Minnesota and Canada, that I began to reconsider journaling. Not two weeks earlier, I had embarked on a nine-month gap-year program, three hours north of my home in West Chicago, Illinois. And now I was seven days into a three-week canoe trip through the many lakes of the boundary waters leading to Lake Superior. Our guides had just canoed each of us to a separate island with nothing to distract us—they even took our watches. I was all by myself with only my thoughts, a Bible, a journal and a pen.
I assumed I’d only find myself catching up on devos mainly, just reading the Bible. However, after 30 or 45 minutes (that’d be my guess, given I had no way to tell the time), I stopped reading. At this point, I felt an unexplainable urge to write instead of read, create rather than consume. I put down my Bible and picked up my journal. And for the first time that I can remember, I wrote, not for an assignment, not for any other person, I wrote just for my own sake.
I don’t remember having such a complete period of time unobstructed by digital or even traditional distractions. I don’t think I’d ever even given myself those few short hours before, just to think, process, organize my chaotic thoughts. And on that island, every pretense and presumption I held about journaling melted away. I still have the journal; I now have several, in fact, which I regularly use.
I don’t own a Diary, no imaginary friend, not just a book of secrets, and if I had emotions (as a man), I wouldn’t just use the pages to archive them. (That’s a joke by the way, some guys do have feelings, humor doesn’t always translate in the medium of text). I own a journal. I own a place to pull thoughts out of my head and put them on paper. A place to be honest about any and everything. A place to pray specifically and intentionally.
I’m a guy, a guy with a journal. You should try it—you might be surprised (like I was) with just how useful this tool can be.