I'm Passionate

Some people might say I'm obsessed...

I like to say I'm passionate. :)

I went journal shopping this weekend with Jarvis and went kind of crazy. I found one in Deseret Book that said Believe in Yourself on the cover... so of course I bought it. It also has some great motivational quotes inside. I really liked that. While I was there I bought one for the little Elder in the fam. He emailed me and asked me to send him another journal. He said the one I gave him before he left is over halfway filled and he wants to make sure he has another one before he runs out of space. I love that kid. :) Jarvis found one, too, and asked me to "spice it up" with journal prompts and stuff. I'll be working on that today since it's my day off. :) After Deseret Book, we went to Barnes & Noble. They have a huuuuge journal selection so I always like to check there, too... which was not necessarily a good thing... because I bought two more journals. One is chucked FULL of quotes about God and scriptures about Him. The front cover has Philippians 4:13 on it (one of my favorites) and the back cover says "God's strength is all you need to accomplish the dreams He has for you." I love it!!! And then I found a super thick, tan leather, hard bound journal and fell in love. It's nothing really special, but it looks like a book my dad would have next to his bed so it's special to me. It's pretty thick. It'll take me a while to fill it, but I'm excited to write in it. When I go journal shopping, I like to think about the stage of life I'm in and whether or not the outside of my journal will reflect what's about to go on the inside. I loved the one from Deseret Book and the one with all the quotes and scriptures, but I feel like I've made a connection with the leather bound one. So after I copy the quotes inside the other two journals, I will be returning them. I've found "the one." ;)

I am just a little bit sad to be returning the one with all the quotes and scriptures in it. The journal I just finished has scriptures in it and I loved how somedays I would write about my life and then look down on the page and realize that the scripture at the bottom was so perfect for what I was writing about. A lot of my entries look like this...

As bummed as I might be about not having scriptures at the bottom of my journal pages, I'm really excited to write in my new journal. It looks like a book, it smells like a book. It's going to be awesome. 

I mentioned that Jarvis asked me to "spice up" his journal. He said he'd be better at writing if there was a purpose to his entries. And I get that. My purpose is different. So real quick before I get into journal prompts, I want to share why I write:

1. I write so that someday my kids can read my journals and realize that I actually DO get what they're going through because I went through the same thing. I hope that by them reading about my life, they are more comfortable to share what's going on in their's with me. This was the first reason I came up with to write and it served me well until I stumbled upon my next reason...

2. I write because of what I read in the only journal (that I know of) that my dad ever kept. A while after my parents got divorced my mom asked me to take a box of my dad's things that she found in the garage over to his house. On the top was a journal. I'm a private person and I respect everyone's right to privacy, but I'm also a very curious person... and in this case curiosity got the better of me. I grabbed my dad's journal and started flipping through it. I'm going to use my master deducing skills to conclude that this was his mission journal because most of the entries were in Portuguese. ;) I felt robbed when I saw that it was all in Portuguese. Here was all of this information, experiences from my dad's life in his own words, right in front of me (!!!) and it was being kept from me. It was terrible. And then towards the back, like an answer to a prayer, I found English. I found the first entry in English and I started reading. My dad was living in Southern California, my mom was going to BYU and she was coming down to visit for the weekend. She was going to stay at my grandparent's house and my dad wanted to do something special for her while she was in town to show her how much he loved her. In the next entry, he wrote about my mom's visit and explained what he did to show his love for her. He woke up early on Sunday morning and made a big breakfast before anyone else was awake. Then he went and woke up my mom and they had breakfast together. When I read this I started to cry because in my house we didn't grow up saying "I love you" very often. At that point in my life, I could remember my dad telling me he loved me three times and each one of those times he cried. I knew that I was loved, but it wasn't something we said. However, for as long as I could remember, my dad woke up early on Sundays, made a big breakfast, then came and woke us up and we would eat breakfast together. I was sitting there in the garage next to a box of my dad's things when I realized my dad had been saying he loved me every Sunday morning over breakfast. I felt so loved!!! And I would have never had this experience if my dad hadn't written it in his journal.

3. Another reason I write is because I want my future grandchildren to know who I am and who I was growing up. My mom's dad died when she was on her mission and my dad's dad died before I was born. The only grandpa I've ever known is my mom's step dad and I didn't grow up close to him. But my dad's dad wrote his history before he died. And one day when I was talking about journaling with my grandma she shared his history with me. It was so much fun to read about my grandpa's life in his own words. I had no idea that he went through some of the things he did and when I got done reading I felt like I knew him so much better. So as strange as it seems, I feel closest to a grandpa I've never met. He's the person I am most excited to meet when I get to the other side and I would have never known him like I do if he hadn't written it down.

4. Another reason I write, and it's the one with the most immediate impact: writing helps me. I write for me every time I open my journal. It's therapeutic, it helps me focus my thoughts, it helps me vent, it helps me understand myself better. I can go back and read my old entries and see how I've changed. I know when certain lessons started to (finally) sink in, haha. I can read about spiritual experiences I had that I've forgotten about. I have a pretty large chunk of time in my life blacked out because of the car accident I was in in high school. I honestly can't remember a good year or so of my life, BUT I journaled. So that time isn't completely lost.

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I write for me every time I open my journal, but I know it's not just for me. So I'm a huge supporter of journaling. I encourage everyone I know to write. I've learned that I prefer to have smaller journals so I can fit them in my purse. I like to have mine on me all the time so I can write whenever. Others prefer to have large ones they can keep by their bed. Some people prefer blank pages so they can draw. I'm not an artist so I prefer to have lines in mine. I don't need journal prompts all the time, but I do enjoy to mix things up. So as I'm sitting here with all these journal prompts for Jarvis, I figure I'll share them with my friends and fam as well. These are pics (from Pinterest) that have given me ideas when I need to mix things up in my journal...

I like this one ^^ because you can do it over and over. Life changes and its fun to have a moment of your life recorded. I probably do something like this once or twice a year.

You could follow this ^^  prompt every day if you wanted to!! I need a little more variety in mine, but this works for some people.

This ^^ is an awesome example of questions you could answer in your journal. I like finding questions to answer (see last pic) because it's not normally stuff you would write about day to day, but it still makes you who you are.

I've done this once or twice. It's not really my thing to write sideways and doodle. And I'm not going to lie, when I see those entries, it doesn't feel like me. So I don't do it. But it's a good idea for people who love to live outside the lines. I'm 100% left brained... I like my lines. ;)

Like this... lines. :) This is more me. Mixing it up a little bit, but not too much. I just get bugged when I really want to write about something that doesn't start with a letter found in one of the days of the week. "Y-eah, so I really need an R and its Sunday... Ryan Gosling is hot. I'm pretty sure Crazy, Stupid Love is my new favorite movie." ;)

THIS ^^ ONE... my evil, unfinished challenge. I got to Day 7... 27 days after I started the challenge and then stopped drawing probably because my drawing of Frodo offering up the ring looks more like a blue ball point pen monster than a hobbit. Although, now that I'm looking at some of these pics, I'm finding a renewed interest in finishing the challenge. I don't care if its conceited, I'm still impressed with my drawing of the giraffe.

I, pretty often actually, write down lyrics to songs that I love. I found a super cute children's book at Andrea's one time and copied the whole thing in my journal (a whopping 42 lines of text.) It could be anything that strikes you as important in that moment. Those are the things I love to write down because it reflects who I am and it's different than the monotonous day-to-day stuff.

I like ^^ this one because it says to write down your prayers. I don't do it very often, but occasionally I write my prayers and I love it!!! When I have to write down every word, it feels more deliberate and my gratitude or my pleadings become more to me than just words. They become real because they are outside of me now, not just in my head. And it takes more time so I feel like God is giving me His undivided attention because I'm dedicating more time than normal to pray. I love writing my prayers.

And last, but most certainly not least, the 30 Questions. This has been my favorite so far!!! Just read them and record your answers somewhere. I didn't go in order, which I think is another great thing. It shows which questions I let work in me before I answered. Some of these questions were hard for me to find answers to, but I answered all of them and I think everyone should.

Now back to copying those quotes and spicing up Jarv's journal...

Hope y'all have a great day.

xoxo bird