When I sat down before a pile of old journals last month, I prepared myself for a barrage of adjectives and angst. The notebooks crowded around me like walls of a torture chamber—spiraled and thread bound ones, some covered with waxy Chinese paintings, others collaged with magazine cutouts. But I needed to fill some gaps in my memory and those journals held the clue. Two mornings and one headache later, I emerged, not only with the salvaged facts under one arm, but six surprising discoveries about myself under the other.
1. Some things never change. (A.K.A., I’ve always been a bit pretentious).
The opening page of my first journal, which I penned around the age of ten, states, “In this journal I will write down all my memories from my early years.” For some reason, I thought that the story of getting my first bed from my grandparents’ basement ought to be saved for antiquity.
Like that diary, I bestowed a title page on every new journal I cracked open, inspired by the importance of the words I had yet to write. I find that propensity, which I still fight, embarrassing, especially given #6 below.
2. My memory serves me well. (Or, at least it serves my ego).
One of the “memories from my early years” shocked me with its rendition of a story I’ve told several times when proving the point that I’m an introvert. I’d cried at a birthday party in kindergarten because the piece of paper under my plate instructed me to sing “Jesus Loves Me”—clear proof that I’ve always been an introvert. But that wasn’t the whole story. My journal revealed that I cried, not just because of the song, but because I wanted my paper to say, “Spank the birthday boy.” Apparently, I wasn’t that much of an introvert.
3. God’s work in my life is messier than I like to admit.
When I tell the story of my faith crisis after college, I remember clear plot points where God intervened and brought insight, after which my path veered off in a new direction. My journals tell a different story though, one where insight came in hazy patches, muddled and mixed with confusion. While I like to think that my spiritual growth follows a straight trajectory, the evidence tells a different story.
4. I wish I could tell my younger self, “Take a deep breath, it’s going to be ok.”
As I read the angst spilled over those pages—the worry that I’d wasted time watching a movie, that I’d idolized fashion because I loved the new shirt I’d bought, that I’d failed God again by not spending more time with him—I wanted to yell through the pages, “Stop killing yourself to earn his love! He accepts you even with your imperfections. That’s what grace is all about.”
Truth is, I still need this reminder. Whenever I get my spiritual panties in a bunch comparing myself to others. Whenever I sin and want to wallow in the guilt. Next decade, when I sit down to read the journals I’m filling out now, hopefully I’ll discover someone more steeped in grace.
5. I used to expect answers from God.
During my faith crisis, I scratched my conversations with God into those journal. I’d write down a question then hover my pen over the page waiting for God to answer. Part of my recovery from the crisis involved facing the reality that God doesn’t always flash his answers at us and that some of what I’d written down was probably my own imagination. Still, rereading those dialogues, conviction cramped in my heart. Certainly God sometimes leaves us waiting for days or months or years, but he also can answer the moment we ask. I want to regain some of the expectancy about God that I used to have.
6. My journals offer a classic example of how NOT to write.
Wading through pages of prayers that I’d stuffed with superlatives and abstract concepts left me parched for one drop of something solid, a story or image. When I stumbled across the tiniest fact about my life in Korea, I felt thrown into an oasis of memories—I could see the security monitor suspended in the corner of the dorm office, the white board in the hallway, and how Abigail’s bangs cut straight across her eyebrows. The other ninety-six percent of my journals left me numb.
Nothing saps a reader quicker than adjectives rising like heat waves off abstract concepts. Two days in my journals left me vowing to spare future readers any such exhaustion.
I suppose I kept those journals in their box the last fourteen years because I knew rereading them would be a special kind of torture. Still, having survived the ordeal, I have a new appreciation for God’s authorship of my life. I’m not the easiest material to work with, but he’s weaving beauty out of this mess, and for that I’m thankful.
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One of my favorites. As we age, God uses our past for continued growth in Him–if we let it.
#4- YES!!! Trying to tell myself that now!