The End of a Journal...

This morning I finished my latest journal. I've been journaling as a passionate therapy of devotion since around 2006. Since then I've journaled almost daily with the exception of most weekends and a few spaces in between. This accounts for five journals and 960+ pages of prayers, musings, poems, complaints, ramblings, scripture commentary, short stories, dirges, dreamings and five times a year I write dedications to my children and wife on their birthdays.

I randomly like to turn to past entries from years gone by to see what my mood was like, or what was happening in my world then. I am often surprised at what I had written having forgotten so easily what went on a year + ago. Sometimes I cringe; sometimes I laugh, but I always remember.

Journaling in years gone by has been for me therapy. Having gone through a spate of depression or down times, journaling to me was a way to cry out to God presenting Him with my fears, failures and looking to clear my head of messes I've created there; or just to have someone I could express myself to without fear of what they thought of me at that moment. Very therapeutic, very healing - crying out to God, that is.

Just this week, I looked at my stack of journals sitting on the shelf in my closet and a strange thought came to me about my mortality. I wondered, "How many more journals are left in me?" I looked at them sitting motionless on the shelf not saying anything vocally audible but whispering my life from their pages. How many more whispers are in there, I wondered again? When will I have penned the last sentence in their pages? How many journals will there have been if I maintain this passion of devotion? Ten? Thirty? A hundred?

I was reminded that one day, perhaps one morning as I'm caught up in prayer in those journaled walls that I will pen my last "Amen". Many of my daily entries end with that single-word-sentence... "Amen." One day that word will have so much meaning for a life lived full, "so be it." And for all intensive purposes, bodily it will be so.

We are given one chance to live our lives; and though our bodies end for a short time our lives are never over. We will write journals too in eternity, but different sorts of journals. Journals that don't hail the passing of a day, but a continuing of an existence that never passes but only perpetuates and continues forward. It's hard to fathom, but there time won't pass... it will only grow, and not be able to be measured to show any limitations. Our journals there won't begin with dates, neither will the entries end for everything there will always have been and will continue to always be. The Light there casts no shadows of darkness, nor will the light pass overhead so that we can count it's passing. The Light there will envelope us from every side and angle so that no darkness exists.

Our journals will be written not by fading pen but by eternally worded phrases that drip from lips that will never dry or parch. They will remain fresh and new and whetted by the Spirit of the One we are completely intertwined with there. The branches will not overbear the Vine nor hide it in anyway, but will be sustained by its Life.

Today, or tomorrow, I will purchase my new latest journal and begin to fill its pages with much the same things as before only in a newer past-tense. The pen will fade and the pages of the new latest journal will become brittle and earn a yellow hue, but the Light that writes eternal journals within will continue to grow and never fade. Though my wrist tingles and arm goes numb from pains of writing, though my hand becomes frail and bent in years to come, the whispers from the pages reach His ears and are never forgotten or yellowed with time. "Amen."