Conversation Point

New Article From Creating Women Ministries

Tell Me Again What I Said: Journaling Conversation

Do you know the old hymn, "I Love to Tell The Story?" It's a personal favorite, partly for the words and the melody, partly because I love stories. For me, stories are what make life interesting because they are about life in all its delicious, intricate detail. One of my mottos has been, "A story for everything and every story in its place." Approaching journaling your prayers, your conversation with God, is talking with God about your shared experience and then leaving some notes for yourself about the chat. Much like any shared experience, it is the stories that we tell each other about the experience that shape our memory, but also our understanding of the experience from new angles and perspectives.

Take, for example, the story of how I learned to ride my bike. Nothing unusual in going from training wheels to frustration without the training wheels, back to training wheels, and then, finally, freestyle sailing around the block, just as the Green Bay Packers clinched the Central Division Championship. That may not make much difference, or sense, to you, but it does to me, a Wisconsin native and daughter of a bike shop owner who also lovingly created my first bike out of spare parts, painted it blue and white to my specifications, and cheered when I ran inside to share my success.

Another story I love is how I met one of my best friends. We were both attending a youth convocation on the North Carolina shore in the middle of a hurricane. it was literally raining inside the bathroom in which we first said our hellos to each other. That first meeting was over twenty years ago. Now, whenever we go to visit each other we usually find each other in the bathroom closest to baggage claim.

You have these kinds of stories in your life. These two stories from my life would be more fully embellished if I had my mom or my friend adding their reflections to this page. Their perspectives would give you and me more information of these experiences. Neither are earth shattering events, but they are details, stitches that unite the quilt pieces into a beautifully patterned life.

Another way of considering this idea is to remember an event that quite literally was earth shattering or culturally defining. Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot? What were you doing when you began to hear the news reports of the terrorist attacks on New York? What part of your holiday celebration was interrupted by news of the tsunami striking Indonesia? In a group of three or four people who had no connection to each other in November1963, September 2001 or December 2004, all their stories converge, add to the shared memory, and the shared experience. The conversation itself becomes an oral history that will be carried to the next time the subject comes up and the conversation includes any or all of these people.

There is only one step between oral history and documented history, and that is the action of writing instrument to paper. Journaling is the act of writing down a story you have lived or heard. Journaling your prayers is talking with God, and then retelling the conversation, the stories between you, in written form, an immediate letter defining with God the glorious details of life. The great gift of recalling a conversation with God is that God knows us each so well that we can just lay it all out there, any way we want to, and not worry that God won't understand. Grammar, syntax, semantics - none of it matters at all. What matters is telling your story, your understanding of the conversation of prayer you have had with God to God in your way. What is quite remarkable is that in doing so we come to understand ourselves, our own story and God's faithful journey with us more fully.

If you are concerned that, even moments later, you won't remember enough or have any idea what to write, take heart: God is on this journey with you, and God is faithfully a part of all the details. As you practice your prayer journaling more reflections, thoughts and connections will reveal themselves to you. Not only is God a part of the details, God is the details.

posted by Cory L. Kemp @ 11:09 AM