Paging your Journal of Devotions
Page your journal of devotions and publish the daily meditations you’ve gleaned & curated from quiet times with the Word of God to gain wisdom in life and love.
Journal writing is one strategy in nurturing a writing discipline. Authors pen their thoughts as diligently as they breathe, as soon as they wake up, and before they sleep. If you’re a writer, you will have rambled on paper or shouted out on screen at any sane or deranged moment. Diaries line a segment of your bookshelf or piles of stationery with your musings sleep deep in your drawers.
Paging your journal of devotional meditations; where have you compiled them? How about sharing them as your witness of “hearing” the Word of God?
While some writers may not be diarists, they will use some productivity app or notes pad to record any idea that will stir their imagination. A pile of ideas slips into folders that will most likely be forgotten. Notes well-kept in boxes will become relics of the past. They will be good for nostalgic browsing if, in the future, someone will remember that they existed at all.
Page your Journal of Devotions with Integrity
And what about yourself in those loose, unorganized sheets of paper? While ideas may stagnate or prosper, the self is preserved, intact and unchallenged in a journal or diary.
How have I lived my life? In reckoning the past decades of my existence, I realize how clueless I had always been. I’m thinking about my devotional entries, ‘snippets of wisdom’ gleaned from reading the Bible. Quiet times of studying the Word has yielded quite a record of guidance and directions for this life’s innumerable confusions. They are testimonies of my spiritual encounters.
Someone reading a memoir might get curious. Is there a congruence or an imbalance between life and letters? Bound pages of the memoir will either assert darkness and decadence or inspire love and hope. The memoir is a clear voice reciting a refrain of how we might live a full life. It is a tangible accounting of how we have numbered our days.
Numbering Loose Leaves as You Page your Journal
Gather all the loose pages of the recorded life. Organize the index cards, notebooks, stationeries, and data saved in the diary pages of the journal. Place a page number in every text landing. Shuffling the cards or flipping through diary note pages will locate cherished scripture notes and devotional insights. Highlight the entries and annotate the parts. Allow thought bubbles of subjects, themes, or titles to emerge. A word, phrase or sentence caption is useful to mark each entry’s place in a planned tapestry.
Ways of Indexing your Life as you Page your Journal
List titles or topics for the journal entries. Use a fresh notebook or employ any computer application for this pre-indexing of content. Allow flexibility at this point. Let the outline emerge:
IN ESTABLISHING CONTENT
Retrieve every entry and give it a title or caption. Identify key contexts or themes. Underline all relevant detail and recall all referents. In a word, phrase or sentence, capture the thesis, argument, idea or imagination that is the main thrust of the recorded thought or event. Index every deliberate and random reference. Note every source jotted in the journal entry. They will be useful in testing and validating the text, especially when editing the pages.
IN THINKING OF CATEGORIES
Think of creative categories for all types of devotions (e.g., reflections on scripture verses, prayers, gratitude lists, etc.). Use those categories as metaphors or indicators of meaning. Identify the general ideas and whittle them down to singular insights.
