My journal

Journaling in pictures

To mark the publication of A Lent Journal, four people reveal how journaling helps them connect with God – this week, Major Meshiel Brown (Poplar)

IHAVE been on a journaling journey for more than 20 years. In the early days I assumed it meant keeping a record of life day by day, like Phileas Fogg in Around the World in Eighty Days or the great explorers of Antarctica or Mount Everest – reflecting on and recalling the excitements, challenges and steps of that day, then writing them down for future reference.

However, that is not what journaling is for me, although it often does hold something important for the future.

I was introduced to journaling through therapy, as I was encouraged to write down my feelings and how I saw them impacting my behaviour. It quickly became something I found really helpful in my normal life setting, initially as more of a reflective way of living, then as a way of praying.

Journaling has gone through changes as I have changed. It has not remained static through different stages in life. Journaling has adapted to fit my need at the time – whether that’s been in the midst of depression, illness, grief, spiritual growth, changes of appointment, family times of rejoicing and, recently, living in the darkest and most painful days of grief and loss I’ve ever known.

I experience journaling as a conversation with myself, God and sometimes others who may choose to engage with my work. Writing my thoughts down enables me to stop overplaying things in my mind. I can come back to them later and rethink, dwell on and pray over them.

In the past five years my journal has taken on a totally new direction and now I find myself journaling through drawing and painting.

During the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020 I spent Monday nights from 11pm to 3am in prayer for friends and family, for our Salvation Army and its mission and whatever God laid on my heart. The difficult thing was that I couldn’t verbalise my prayers. Nothing would come out of my mouth. No matter how hard I tried, I was speechless. My instincts took me to a more creative way of praying through journaling. I’d done it before, so I decided to see what God and I could come up with.

My pictures became my journal and my prayers. Some were complete in a night and others I returned to over a number of weeks as more came out of them, as God spoke into them and as I saw grace being poured over those prayers. Take this picture (left), for example. It started as a heart, as I was thinking about someone I loved very much who had recently died. As I painted, I wanted to add more colour – but the more I added, the more the heart became hidden. The disappointment of that was with me as I went to bed and slept. But when I returned the next day to that picture, I came with Matt Redman’s song ‘The Heart of Worship’. Thinking about it on a personal level helped me see that sometimes we can’t add colour to something that is too painful. Sometimes we just have to sit with it and see it for what it is. On a wider scale I thought about how, as a church, we can bury the heart of worship, Jesus, under a lot of other stuff.

Journaling for me is a special time when I know God comes near to me. Sometimes I feel as if I’m drawing a picture to go on God’s fridge, as a child might do for a parent. To receive words of prophecy in a picture is incredible and wonderful – it’s confirming and a blessing.

I’m so glad that you don’t have to be an artist to use pictures in prayer and journaling. God gets me, he knows where I’m coming from and, through the creative ways he’s led me to, has enabled me to go deeper with him.

A Lent Journal is available from sps-shop.com/ books for £5 (plus postage and packaging)