Dear Journal (New Era)

By Jeanine Tibbitts

Jeanine Tibbitts, “Dear Journal,” New Era, Aug. 1975, 30

Tucked neatly away in my bureau drawer is a one-year diary with a bright red cover. On the front is a name: Miss Frypan. My roommate gave me that diary the first year I started teaching school, and there it sits, empty.
I like the name she put on it and for a good reason. During my student teaching, one of my seventh graders left on the floor a slip of paper on which he had lampooned my maiden name. (I was Miss Fry then.) He had drawn a delightful frying pan with eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth, and written out to the side was the name, Miss Frypan. I never want to forget my roommate or that drawing. The diary helps me remember, but that is all it does.
On my desk, however, is a large spiral binder (the kind with divisions and pockets). I grabbed it one day when I had things—spiritual things—tumbling around in my head that couldn’t wait to be written. I finished that first entry; from then on I was hooked. The notebook fit me. It was handy and without space restrictions, and I wasn’t afraid to make mistakes in it or add notes or drawings. That notebook became my journal, and it is richer and fuller than that one-year diary ever could have been.
Writers of dictionaries have not made a distinction between diaries and journals, but modern use has. All too often a diarist writes solely for himself. He cramps an outline of his day into six lines and calls it good; occasionally he writes up one daily activity in more detail. But we Mormons are a peculiar people, and we have grown away from that kind of diary and into a special kind of journal.
The desire to keep a journal comes to God’s people as a blessing. It comes to all those who fear the Lord and call upon his name, who speak often one to another and acknowledge God in their lives. These journals, then, when written before the Lord, serve to strengthen lives and family units and become special missionary tools.
Like the Nephites, we must also “labor diligently to write, to persuade our children, and also our brethren, to believe in Christ, and to be reconciled to God.” (2 Ne. 25:23.) And to those of us who remember God in this way, he has promised, “And they shall be mine … in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.” (3 Ne. 24:17.)
All of the examples used in this article are excerpts from journals written by Church members. Because these journalists realize the importance of keeping a record before the Lord, they have agreed to share themselves with you; and by so doing, they hope that you, too, will be blessed with a desire to keep a journal.
A journal is a place to understand yourself, a place to exhaust frustrations, a place to find out who you are, a place where you can rid yourself of crippling emotions. One young lady wrote, “Jealousy! Just to express that deep, hollow feeling relieves me of it. I never realized that writing could do that for me.” (Sharon Lynn Glasser, Monterey, California.) You have no idea either, until you start.