Journal Writing

Author: unknown

Sing: I am glad for many things (CS 151)

Lesson:
When is it time to begin to make a journal? Who might read your journal? How might it benefit them? What can be written in a journal? What would you like to be able to read about in a journal?

Record Keeping Is an Important Principle: Explain that journals are a special way of sharing our lives with our children and grandchildren. President Spencer W. Kimball challenged everyone to keep a journal.

"Get a notebook, my young folks, a journal that will last through all time, and maybe the angels may quote from it for eternity. Begin today and write in it your goings and comings, your deepest thoughts, your achievements and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies" ("The Angels May Quote from It," New Era, Oct. 1975, p. 5).

Share the story below. "I can remember as a child wanting to know what my mother was really like. … I wanted a mother so much.

"I had had a mother, of course, Mary Black Rawlins, but she had died when I was only nine weeks old, and she was only twenty-six. When my father came home from work one afternoon, he found her lying on the kitchen floor, a victim of heart failure. Those who knew Mother best found it too painful to talk about her, so I never found out much about her.

"Then, when I was seventeen, my father's mother came to visit me. She told me that my mother had known about her heart condition when she had married. She had known that if she had a baby she would probably die. But my mother, undaunted and determined, felt strongly that she should have a baby. She decided that I, the child born to her, was worth life itself. When I learned that, the love I had for my mother swelled, for I knew that she had loved me too, loved me enough to willingly give her life for me.

"It was then that my father brought to me a journal that my mother had written. She had kept it each day for one short year of her life. I had now in my hands one year of my mother's life. She had been a school teacher in Wyoming that year, and through her own words she became for me a real person at last. She cried, she struggled, she laughed, she grumbled, she learned of her heart condition, and I … I shared it all with her!

"That record, that precious, loved record—it's all I have of her. What if she had not kept it?" ("For Your Remembrance: A Presentation on Record Keeping" [audiovisual presentation, 1975 MIA June Conference]).