Keeping a journal can foster progress
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On the Sunday between Christmas and New Year's Day, Bishop Frank D. Gibson of the McCullough Hills Ward in Henderson, Nev., shared with the members of his ward words of ebullient enthusiasm and encouragement regarding the coming year.
One of the main points Bishop Gibson emphasized was the windfall of blessings that can come from keeping a journal. In that vein, he offered to share with anybody who asked it of him a copy of a "cheat sheet" he had compiled about how to implement and maintain an effective course of journal writing. The primer contained 16 bullet points beneath the heading, "Everyone should be a student of their own life, and your journal is your workbook. You write it yourself as you go along, page by page."
Afterward, Bishop Gibson reflected about his underlying purpose for attempting to stoke the desire of his ward members toward becoming keepers of consistent, quality journals.
"I think that if you're going to make progress in any aspect of life, you have to keep track of that progress and you have to keep track of it somewhere," he said. "I think it's a good practice to use a journal as a workbook to keep track of progress.
"I especially encourage people to write questions to themselves. It's so easy to ask the easy questions; we want to be able to ask the more difficult questions as we go along. 'What kind of person do I want to be? Why do I want to be that kind of person? What do I need to do to get from where I am to where I want to go?' It's a way to hold myself accountable. Without having to talk it over with somebody else, you can talk it over with your journal."
Prophetic precedents
The practice of keeping a journal is deeply ingrained into LDS culture. So much of what we know about the early days of the Church and the pioneers who blazed the trail westward comes from personal histories and journals.
For instance, President Wilford Woodruff kept a meticulous daily journal. Dean C. Jessee, a research historian at BYU, detailed the scope and breadth of President Woodruff's writing in the July 1993 issue of the Ensign.
Brother Jessee wrote: "Beginning shortly after his conversion [in 1833] and continuing to his death in 1898, Wilford Woodruff's day books and journals, comprising thirty-one handwritten volumes, cover almost the entire span of the Church's nineteenth-century history. For Elder Woodruff, the writing of a diary was inherent in ordination to the priesthood. As an avid student of the past, he recognized that the story of God's dealings with mankind could not be written without the records of eyewitnesses."
Even as the pace of life has quickened with the passage of time, living prophets have continued to place emphasis on the importance of, at a bare minimum, making and keeping a record of testimony-building experiences. At the October 2007 general conference, President Henry B. Eyring of the First Presidency spoke about how personally keeping a written record — even if it falls short of being a full-fledged journal — creates the opportunity for remembering the specific manifestations of the Lord's hand in our lives.
"My point is to urge you to find ways to recognize and remember God's kindness," he said. "It will build our testimonies. You may not keep a journal. You may not share whatever record you keep with those you love and serve. But you and they will be blessed as you remember what the Lord has done."
President Eyring also spoke about his own experience of keeping a spiritual book of remembrance for the benefit of posterity. He said that, beginning when his children were very young, he began writing a few lines every day about what had happened on that particular day. Before beginning to write he would ponder this question: "Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?"
"As I kept at it," President Eyring recalled, "something began to happen. As I would cast my mind over the day, I would see evidence of what God had done for one of us that I had not recognized in the busy moments of the day. As that happened, and it happened often, I realized that trying to remember had allowed God to show me what He had done."
Tips and tricks of the trade
Roger C. Flick has some suggestions for Church members wanting to commence keeping their own journals during 2010.
Brother Flick is somewhat of an expert in the field of LDS personal histories and journal keeping. He teaches classes every year at BYU Education Week about how to maintain a spiritual book of remembrance. He formerly taught students at BYU how to write a comprehensive personal history before he retired from teaching at the university level; he still works at BYU's Harold B. Lee Library in computer-assisted genealogy research and is president of the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers.
Drawing on his experience, he offers the following practical tips for those with their sights set on becoming better journal keepers in 2010:
Try loose-leaf binders: "It was hard for me to keep bound journals because I kept leaving spaces to go back and fill in certain dates, but I never did. So I went to a type of journal that can keep loose pages, [like] a three-ring binder. As things came along I'd keep them in the form that I took the notes and record the date at the top. I don't need to really keep them organized, because organization comes at the end when I have the time to transcribe them onto the computer, print them out and then put them in a three-ring binder."
Use folders and index cards: "When I'm really pressed for time and can't sit down at the computer to put things in their final form, I like to take manila folders or envelopes, label them by subject, and put them in my filing cabinet. If I go to a program or listen to somebody give a presentation, I'll write the essence of it on a 3-by-5 index card and date it and just drop it into a folder by subject or by date. I can write very small and keep a lot of notes on a little card. If I don't get to them right away, it doesn't bother me. When the time is appropriate I will sit down at my computer and type from those little cards, just type up what I want to preserve and throw the little notecards away."
Stay flexible: "What you ought to do is do what works for you. I've done a variety of things, and I think I've finally discovered what works for me."
