Last night I spent a long time flipping through an old journal and remembering where I’ve been. Reading the old memories and the old prayers helps me see how far I’ve come and how far I have yet to go. The journal I read last night contains some of the most important moments of the past five years of my life. It holds memories from the year I lived in Texas and the months preceding my wedding, my first year of marriage and the beginning of my work at Beeson. I scribbled countless prayers, scripture verses and endless musings in those pages. Sometimes I laughed. Other times I cried. But I always wrote to remember.
I’m ashamed to admit that I have a bad habit of losing my train of thought when I pray. I start my silent prayers with good intentions but before I know it, I’m chasing rabbits down overgrown paths, and I forget not only what I was praying for but also that I was even praying to begin with. Even worse, sometimes I forget the things that I pray about, and I have no way of knowing when God has answered my prayers. I began writing my prayers down the summer after I graduated from high school. I had kept a diary since the fifth grade, but that summer, something shifted in my relationship with God, and I began to write to him. My diaries grew up with me, and they became journals, a written record of my spiritual life.
