Journaling Our Thoughts, Feelings and Faith

Contemplate for a moment how you felt the instant you set eyes on your really 1st love. Is that how you feel just about this person today? What do you think just about this person, if you even as think just about them at all anymore? Memory back to that moment, are you able to articulate your faith experience from that time? How would-be you describe your faith now? Wherever our thoughts, feelings and faith fit into our journaling process are as crucial as every another element, if not much so. Recognizing them as the main ingredients of the whole of life is just about as simple, and as complicated, as as it gets. If you are able to clarify your thoughts, feelings and faith about an earlier or present experience through journaling them, you have the capacity to transform your life.

Undisturbed and unexamined, old thoughts can continue to direct us down unusable, in person annihilating paths, departure us inquisitive why our lives are miserable and frustrating. Possibly your structure skills are a challenge for you, and each time you are in a position to plan an event, personal or professional, you become defeated and are not sure wherever to begin. Your mind goes in three some directions at once, you are unable to focus on a set of steps to put together the theme, the activities, the refreshments and the guest list. Journaling this process in the present can help you focus your energy, understand wherever your thoughts are taking you, and, over time, help you airt your thoughts down much productive avenues.

Negative feelings, set in emotional concrete and stroked fierily over the years, scrape away at our souls until, turning to hardened calluses, we no longer remember to feel thing another than bitterness and resentment. Left unexamined, unchallenged, life passes us by. All the positive energy in the earth bounces off the solid boundaries of person determined to remain involved in disenchantment and denial. Writing down how we feel just about any is happening in our lives chiefly gives us perspective. From heart, to pen, to paper, we are creating a channel for our feelings, and a little bit of space that gives us breathing room, and an chance to do some feeling choices for ourselves. Once we have become so intimate with a pattern of feelings that we can only sense the trench deepening below us, we need to create a new pattern. Journaling can help us create that new, possibly life-altering pattern by 1st giving us the chance to recognize the old one we are in without judgment or fear.

By the same token, faith left unexamined is normally a faith not lived, and becomes a faith that succumbs to stagnation or death. Prayer is clearly a key component to infusing energy, strength and intention into our faith, but journaling can once again give us the chance and the framework to recharge ourselves by cathartic old patterns to do room for the new. Have you ever consciously asked yourself how your faith spoke to you in any given situation? How just about once you were baby-faced with a tough disciplinary situation with your child? Or once you were trying to decide on how to balance your activity with your personal life? How did your faith speak to you as you woke up this morning? All of these are situations in which our faith is present, whether we use its strength and wisdom purposefully in our lives, or not. Journaling how we understand our faith has, or has not, self-addressed our lives recently or in the past, can help us begin to use our faith consciously and regularly.

Considering how our thoughts, feelings and faith speak to us in the journaling process invites God to the dialogue, a God-centered speech in which we can observe how and once our beliefs were engaged, or not engaged, in the process of living. An examined life transforms to an abreast of life, and an abreast of life transcends to a consciously-lived life. Once we are conscious on our journey, it's a whole lot easier to recognize God and follow our intention in life.

About The Author

Cory L. Kemp

As an ordained minister I have worked in educational ministries in some congregations, as well as pastoring a congregation. My writing has focused on nonfictional prose essays and I have recently submitted a system memoir for publication. My ministerial background and love of writing have combined to develop Creating Women Ministries, a website dedicated to encouraging system dialogue, particularly among women, through workshops, journaling and personal spiritual development. My website can be found at http://www.creatingwomenministries.com, and I can be reached by email at creatingwomen@irun.com. My web log is placed at http://creatingwomenministries.blogspot.com.

This article was announce on Gregorian calendar month 21, 2005