Author: Elisabeth Elliot
Source: Keep A Quiet Heart
Chronicle of a Soul
I kept a five-year diary from high school through college, and began spiritual journals during my senior year in college (1948), which I continue to keep. These are chronicles of growth: mental, emotional, and spiritual. It is astounding to go back through them and learn things I had completely forgotten. It is wonderfully faith-strengthening to see that indeed "all the way my Savior leads me," hears my prayers, supplies my needs, teaches me of Himself. As God said to Israel, "Thou shalt remember all the way which the Lord thy God led these forty years in the wilderness."
My memory is poor. A journal is a record of His faithfulness (and my own faithlessness too--which teaches me to value His grace and mercy). If you decide to begin recording your pilgrimage, buy yourself a notebook (or one of those pretty flowered cloth-bound blank books available in gift and stationery stores) and begin to put down (not necessarily every day):
Lessons learned from your reading of Scripture. (If you put these in a journal instead of marking up your Bible, you will find new things each time you read the Bible instead of reading it through the grid of old notes. Worth a try?)
Ways in which you intend to apply those lessons in your own life. (Reading your journal later will reveal answers to prayer you would otherwise have overlooked.)
Dialogues with the Lord. What you say to Him, what He seems to be saying to you about some problem or issue or need.
Quotations from your spiritual reading other than the Bible.
Prayers from the words of hymns which you want to make your own.
Reasons for thanksgiving. (Caution: when you get into the habit of recording these, the list gets out of hand!)
Things you're praying about. You might choose to have a separate notebook for this, or an "appendix" in another section of the same book--date on which a prayer was prayed; date on which answered, with space for how the answer came in some cases.
If you have a family, I would strongly urge you as a family to keep a prayer notebook together. This will help everybody first of all to learn to pray about everything, instead of merely talking or worrying or arguing. It will also help you to be specific, to hold your requests before the Lord together, and then to note the answers and give thanks together (especially when the answers weren't the ones you were looking for).
As George MacDonald wrote, "No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things."
"Where I found Truth, there I found my God, the Truth itself, which since I learnt, I have not forgotten.... Too late I loved Thee, O Thou Beauty of ancient days, yet ever new! too late I loved Thee! And behold, Thou wert within, and I abroad, and there I searched for Thee... Thou calledst, and shoutedst, and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shonest, and scatteredst my blindness. Thou breathedst odors, and I drew in breath and pant for Thee. I tasted, and hunger and thirst. Thou touchedst me, and I burned for Thy peace."
"[W]hen in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things."
The words of George MacDonald as always bless me, and the final quote - from Augustine - rapturous glory.
Mercy and Truth abound here because of thee, dear JockoManning!