Work in Progress

There are two moments that I really love celebrating. The first is that great feeling you get when you’ve just read the last chapter of Revelation, knowing that you’ve just finished another BibleReadthrough and that you get to start back at Genesis again! Although I have just started the ReadThrough again and am finishing up Exodus, that’s not the one I want to talk about…

The other great feeling is that amazing feeling you get when you fill up the last page in a journal!  And I love it because of the way I journal.

I call these books my “prayer journals” because I use them to pray in (strangely enough). They began as a tool to help me to focus when I was praying, because I found the time I had was always in inconvenient places like one-hour commutes on the train, or sitting in a busy coffee shop. So one day I bought a blank book and decided to write my prayers. (I started journaling several but never finished one, and can still remember 3 or 4 years ago, sitting in a coffee shop in Glasgow, filling up the last page of a journal for the first time. I quickly jumped up, hugged my friend Sarah, we celebrated a little, and then I went hunting for a new one!)

It has been a wonderful tool for me. It taught me to prayer longer. It has allowed me to prayer better. I can monitor my prayers and check for habits. I love reading back through them and seeing how God has answered prayers. And I love looking back through them and seeing how I have matured in my relationship with God, and how my faith has deepened over time.

I love finishing a journal because I know I have in front of me a book full of conversations between God and I, and who knows, maybe one day someone will read through them and be challenged and inspired by my journey. I finished a journal early on in the Israel trip and spend a good few days hunting around Israel for a decent journal. I ended up with the Blue one up top. (I added a Starbucks sticker because I could never tell what was the front and what was the back!) Fortunately this time I don’t need to go hunting. Brian Luse, who I worked with in my first year here in the States bought me a really nice brown leather journal about a year ago that I haven’t used yet. So, lucky me… I get to start a new chapter in my journey with God, reading back through the Old Testament having lived in it’s land, and starting a new journal as I embark on the final year of my degree at Multnomah.