Journaling has been an important spiritual discpiline in my life. Knowing how this discipline can form the lives of our students, I regularly encourage them to practice the discipline of journaling. I recently received this email testimony about journaling from one of our students and share it here with permission.

Hi Pastor Pat,

Your message about trusting God when you have a cliff in your life really spoke to me. I just began to journal prayers last September…so the beginning of this September. I have a couple cliffs in my life right now. I guess many people would not consider them to be big cliffs….but to me they are very important decisions. I realized after you spoke that I was not trusting God enough to fully place these decisions in his hands. So, I decided that it would be a good idea to review old prayers that I had typed up and look at how many times God has carried me through situations that I have prayed for in the past.
It really amazed me at the number of times that he has carried me through difficult decisions and situations. I counted a MINIMUM of 72 times since last September! And….this doesn’t count all of those nursing tests and assignments—who knows how many times that I have prayed to make it through the semester! 🙂 Or any of the times that I have prayed without journaling which I’m sure provided many more answers to prayer. I did not realize how much God answers prayer! 🙂 Journaling my prayers helped me to see that God is helping me all the time…even in little situations. (Without journaling I just noticed God with big situations in my life, but now I see how much he helps me with little decisions each day!)
In November, I had made this comment in one of my prayers, “I realized from the sermon that I am not trusting enough in your power. I pray that you would take this situation fully into your hands and that you would help me to forget that this situation ever existed! I know that you can do it, all I need to do is let you have the whole situation under your control and take my hands off of it.” A few weeks later, in another prayer, the entire situation was resolved—and not in a way that I was expecting…but it worked out better that way! 🙂 I realized by reading this statement that this is something that I will continuously have to remind myself to do…and right now it is something that I need to do.
So thank you so much for your message on Friday! It is such a good idea to journal! It, honestly, sounded boring when I first heard about doing it…and since I looked back on it after chapel…I am so thankful that I decided to journal down those prayers!
If God helped me through a minimum of 72 little things since September….why would I not trust him to guide me and give me wisdom through a big life decision right now? …..

So, what about you. Have you tried journaling yet?