The Journal

Hi friends!  Sorry for the delay in posting.  I needed to take some time off to regroup and get my bearings under me.  It was a good break.  Now…back to the story.

 

Remember my grandmother’s journal that I discovered?  Well, I’ll get to that part of the story a little later (keep reading to the end of this post), but first let me share about my journaling journey as part of my plan to stay healthy.

As I started to journal, the first couple of weeks it was filled with bullet points of what I did during the day.  Then I started recording encounters I had that day.  Soon after, I started writing about how those encounters affected me, what emotions were evoked by those encounters, and how I handled those emotions.  By the end of the journal, I was writing out my frustrations, disappointments, victories, and prayers to God.  It was quite a healing progression.

Journaling became a physical way for me to get my thoughts out of my head and onto paper.  I experienced a physical release in doing this exercise.  Since personal computers were not as popular in 1998 as they are now, I wrote in a small spiral book with blank lines with my favorite pen that rolled out the words as fast as my thoughts flew. (I still journal this way today!) I didn’t care how neat my writing was – this was only between me and God.  However, when there were emotions that I needed to process with someone, I would share them with either Mr. Small Town or my therapist.

I quickly discovered a peace that came with journaling because at the end of the day, I could turn the page and there was a clean blank page ready to be filled – not only by me, but by God.   It was a good reminder to me that God only gives me a page at time in my story.  I needed that.  I so wanted to jump to the end of this chapter in my life so I could move on – but I couldn’t.  I wasn’t the author.  God was and He had a plan, even if I couldn’t see it.  Journaling helped me stay focused on only one day at a time.

Journaling also brought healing.  It was good to record, see, express, and release all the emotions and details of my day.  As I would reflect over the day with God, I let the day go.  Sometimes I would even rip out the page and throw it away as a physical act of letting it go.  It was very therapeutic.

As I mentioned in my last post, it was during the start of my journaling experience that I discovered my grandmother’s journal.  I was four years old when my grandmother, Clara, died in 1971 at the age of 76.  Unlike my older cousins and siblings, I don’t have too many memories of her.  (Note: My mother is number 10 out of Clara’s 10 children and I am number 41 of Clara’s 43 grandchildren.)  However, I do remember going to her house in town.  Her upholstered chair that rocked was placed directly across from the television in her front room.  I often stayed with her during the afternoons when she would watch her ‘soap operas’.  She’d take me in her arms and rock me for my afternoon nap as she watched television.  To me, Clara was just a warm memory in that chair and a photograph of an older woman.  She had little significance in my life.  Until, I started reading her journal.

Clara’s journal begins in July 1916 when she is 22 years old.  To give you some background of her life, her father was a merchant.  Her family owned the local mercantile within a rural community in central Pennsylvania.  (I’m picturing something like Nells Olsons’s mercantile from Little House on the Prairie television show.)   She and her family were accustomed to the finer things in life. They would have been labeled as ‘city folk’ within the farming community where they resided.

When she was 11, her father unexpectedly passed away.  Her family’s life quickly changed not just because of the death but also the mercantile was sold to pay off the debt for unsold merchandise, and her mother, brother and she had to move in with her aunt and uncle.  I don’t have much information about her life between the ages 12 through 22 but I can only imagine the grief she and her family endured during that period.

When I opened her journal, I saw written in her handwriting, “After my depression”.  This led me to believe that she started her journal after spending some time with some mental health professionals.  This was her journal that she kept as part of her ‘plan’ to stay emotionally healthy.

I couldn’t believe it!  Here was my 22 year old grandmother’s journal that she kept in 1916 as part of her plan to maintain her mental/emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being.  And 72 years later, her granddaughter, ME, is reading it as I journal for my well-being!  Only God could have orchestrated this – ONLY GOD!!

As I read through her journal God brought a certain peace to my soul and, as if I was transported back in time (you know, like a Hallmark Movie!), I began to cherish reading about her daily life – helping her mother and brother take care of their boarding house and their guests, walking to the springs every evening with her friends, and participating in her church’s Sunday School program.  It was if my grandmother was speaking to me through the journal.   As I read it, I experienced that same warm memory of being in her arms as she rocked me to sleep all those years before.  But this time it wasn’t Grandma Snyder – the farmer’s wife, who gave birth 11 times, who had to bury a six month old son, who raised 10 children on a farm, who survived the Great Depression with her husband and children, and who sent sons off to war.  It was lovely young Clara, a vibrant young woman full of life.  Oh, and did I mention that she too moved from a small town to the big city of Pittsburgh to be a telephone operator – such a career woman of the early 1900’s!  I couldn’t believe how much we had in common in our lives!

It wasn’t a coincidence that her journal had survived 72 years and I was reading it at this exact moment in my life.  God had it planned!  He is such a great Author!!

Come back next week and I’ll tell you some more of the story!

 

Friends, do you journal?  Are you afraid to journal?  Are you worried what other people will think if they ever read your journal?  Forget about it!  Journaling is just between you and God.  If you want, you CAN destroy the journal.  Or, you can keep it.  Who knows?  Maybe one day our grandchildren will discover our journals and God will use it as He writes their story.

 

Many blessings to you my friends!

 

You can read the posts leading up to this post by clicking here, photo post, post 2, post 3,  post 4, post 5, post 6, and post 7.
This is post 8 in the series.