JOURNALING TO DELIVERANCE

There is a distinct difference between being alive and living. I spent a great many years of my life just being alive. There were great moments, many of them, yet I was still simply existing. Get up, take the kids to school, go to work, come home, start over. I was in this never ending cycle of constant routine, like a ferris wheel that I woke up and blindly got on and the wheel began to turn. So it was with everything in my life. Even church was filled with tasks and to do lists, deadlines and meetings. I was on the wheel there also. The wheel became my normal and being on it was a behavior to which I became accustomed.


As a young person I loved to journal. There was something about pouring out my feelings on paper that somehow allowed me to see myself. As I became older and found myself merely existing I stopped journaling because I was afraid of what I might see in myself.
Yes, I am a Christian and I was afraid. The thought of it terrified me. I was a Christian that was fearful and perpetually unhappy which for me, brought a level of guilt and shame. How do you profess Christ and all the liberation He brings and fell like this? That was just one more thing adding weight to my soul.


I witnessed the grace of God everyday, as I raised my children while in this state of deep depression. I was sad all of the time and my sadness presented as frustration, impatience and a very short temper. While I am quite sure that my girls did not escape my condition unscathed, I look at how amazing they are as women and give God all of the glory for protecting them.


My oldest daughter gifted me a beautiful journal. (God always gives you what you need when you need it). That day I began to pour out my soul on paper. All of it came out. Everything. I wrote sometimes an hour or two at a time. I cried as I wrote. I was releasing all of the heaviness of my depression onto the paper. The act of writing it all down resulted in the lightening of the load. Reading my journal entries showed me that I had a lot of spiritual work to do in order to be inline with God’s will and purpose for my life. Those entries revealed the ugly parts of my heart. It was then that I could begin to heal and come out of the dark pit in which I was existing.


We serve a God who not only promised life, but life more abundantly. Abundance is simply a large quantity of something so some look at that scripture and define abundantly as having more money. I look at it as having large quantities of joy. The joy has been restored in my life which is worth more than any amount of money. There will certainly be times when you and I are sad, but learn from my account, sadness does not have to turn into years of despair when we look at our condition through the lens of the Gospel . Doing that is what will lead to deliverance.