I find it maddening when I stop journalling, and lose the thread. It’s as if the very days themselves have been lost. They’ve not been captured, kept and made sense of. They’ve not been imbued with the narrative thread of the rest of my days, which when patched together, resemble a life that has meaning, purpose, sense and providence.
It’s not the journalling itself that grants these days their meaning, of course. The observations and events likely aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. It’s the deliberate act of chronicling them that grants some semblance of integrity, of a logic that connects the events, the details into a meta narrative that may, one day, reflect something of the plan that our good Lord had for my life.
It is prayer that sanctifies work; not the labour in and of itself, which may be undertaken with a spirit of resentment and futility. When I journal, I recognise my self, my being, and my existence as willed by a loving Father who guides, directs, leads, drawing me silently onwards. And when I lay my scrawling down on the page, I try to make sense of His will for me, and am able to see how well, or how poorly I’m playing my part.
And this dispatch is of course, a deliberate act of being - a moment in the day to mark, measure and affirm the love I have for the written word and all it can entail, in mystery, in will, in truth. It’s a humble love letter to a life of letters, tracing my finger in the sand, tipping my hat to anyone who may wish to care, or to do the same and scratch the line of memory and mastery upon a forgiving wall.