My first journal was an ugly black thing. I had completed my freshman year in college and moved back home for the summer, but by then my family had moved to a rural area and no longer had a designated room for me in their house. That was also the year that my first college romance fizzled when my boyfriend had flunked out of his pre-med courses and gone back home to his high school sweetheart.
That ugly black journal became the repository of all my anger, sadness, and frustration in going through the first stages of what would later be termed “adulting.” I still have that first journal and when I happened to re-read it a few years ago I was amazed at how clueless I was then, but also by how much I’ve matured (thank God!) in the subsequent years.
You should see the boxes of journals I’ve gathered over the years. They’re a cornucopia of colors and textures, sizes, and varying thicknesses. But I would never let you read them unless you were among my closest friends and already knew all my dark secrets and weaknesses.
My journals and all the self-help books I’ve ever read and kept for re-reading became my brand of healing and comfort.
One of my strongest senses is the sense of touch, so those journals usually stimulate that…with their embossed color covers, the finish on the pages, the heft that resulted from ink flowing onto those pages and weighting them with emotionally and heavy blue or black lines of cursive. When I take the time to re-read them, my hands slide over the smoothness and the image of ink on paper as I reconnect with the person I was at the time.
For me and for hundreds of thousands of others, journaling is a way to connect with my soul and express and release emotion. My journals have been my healing home. They have been the repository of prayers and desperate pleas for crisis interventions. They’ve also been a place to record a poem or phrase that touches my heart. Journals are creativity and love in action…love for self (or its opposite on occasion), love for others and our Creator. They can be like a love letter to Jesus.
As we put pen to paper….whether it’s a journal you buy in a bookstore or just a spiral notebook you picked up in a bargain bin….we’re taking the things that haunt or disturb us and moving them from a pen, up our hands and arms and out of our heads and hearts. The things that upset us are leaving our bodies when we journal. They’re left on a page for us to read later for further insight and perspective. Or to burn or throw in the trash. It’s your choice.
And that, dear reader and fellow journaler, is the underlying basis of the Writing to Heal Academy masterclass. You’re going to be journaling with Jesus by your side to pull the trauma out of your heart and head where it can no longer harm you or haunt you.
Cheri and I will be right here to help you through this healing journey, which has been created by and with the help of Jesus, and for your benefit.
For more on the benefits and types of journals Cheri and I have collected over the years, you might enjoy a video we recorded in the initial stages of creating this curriculum. You can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnR5zfL5QeA