We all have notebooks and journals where we write down our feelings and thoughts of the day or whatever situation we are going through. I love to write but I end up forgetting about my journal so it ends up taking longer to finish a full journal. 2 years ago my mom gave me a beautiful journal that has a cross drawn on the front of it and creamy white pages inside. When I got it I had no idea how much of my life would be written on those pages.
For 2 years that journal has been with me, through the good times and bad you can read about everything on those pages. I love the fact that I didn’t write everyday and how even though there were long periods of time between my entries I was still able to pick up where I left off. It’s incredible to see where you were and where you are now. As I look through these pages I shake my head and laugh at how crazy I was about things and how I would write sweet and short letters to God, but each time getting longer and longer as I started to grow up. Now sometimes these letters were not so sweet because for a time in my life I was very angry with God.
Around the middle of the journal you see a shift in my writing style and how I end up talking to God. Each page of the journal is dated so when that shift occurred I recognized why once I saw the date. In October 2014 my sweet an kind friend, that I spent most of my childhood with, passed away. It was a hard hit, I had people pass away in my life before but at the time I was so young there wasn’t an understanding of what was really happening. Just as I was starting to get back into my routine my dog had to be put down (and if you own a dog you know how hard that it because your dog is family). As new year rolled around my family suffered another loss, the loss of my grandfather. I can still hear him sometimes telling me not be be crabby Abbie, he called me that whenever I would get annoyed at my 3 brothers which was often! The ache in my heart grew and grew, I became angry at God for taking these people out of my life and making me go through this. There are pages and pages where I scream through my words saying that this shouldn’t have happened to my family.
Just as broken as I was God knew that I needed to go through all of that pain to realize that life isn’t going to be easy if you’re a Christian, that walking in faith is needed to continue My relationship with God. Yet another shift in my writing, I changed from being angry at him to taking my steps in faith and not being scared of the future. After reading these pages of revelation I see how much work needed to be done on my heart and still needs to be done, but then I turn the page and read about the words God has given me such as CHOSEN; I see how much God has blessed me with and the life I’m about to live out of my comfort zone (and out of the country).
These pages that are filled with different colored ink and handwriting give me such joy to look through. 2 years of growing all stuffed into one journal. And now that the journal is full I get to begin a new one just as a new chapter of my life begins. I know that someday someone will end up reading my journal and seeing everything I have been through and the lessons from camps and churches I wrote notes about, but I look forward to that day where my life is opened up to someone else. I just hope that this simple journal with a cross on the front of it gives that someone as much faith and joy that it gave to me as I wrote out my life in it.
