Recently, as I studied the material for my next Sunday School lesson, I was pricked in my heart about my lack of journaling.

Growing up, I was always encouraged to keep a journal.  After all, as President Spencer W. Kimball said when I was very young,

Get a notebook, 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.

From age 8 to age 12, I was very sporadic in my journal writing.  But when I turned 13, something took off.  From that age until I was married at age 23, I wrote detailed, copious journal entries, as well as detailed letters to friends in college.  I filled several books with my script, which changed from very slanted to more neatly standing up straight over the years.  In college, I started typing my journal when possible, printing out the entries every so often to hole-punch and keep in a binder.

And then, when I got married, it all stopped.  Well, it didn’t stop entirely, but I found myself hesitant to write anything.  After all, there were things I really didn’t want the whole world reading.  Did I want my posterity to read things which may end up being called a breach of loyalty toward my husband?  (Face it–no matter how good the marriage, it takes work and struggle, especially at the beginning.)

Later, I justified my lack of journaling by the fact I wrote longer e-mails to my family and saved them in the Cloud.  After all, that was something of a record–something similar to elementary family history.

But as I read my curriculum and reread the Kimball article, I felt something was missing.  I might have a record of something funny my daughter did, but I did not have a record, necessarily, of my own personal struggles and triumphs.  From the same Kimball article,

. . . how happy we are as we find our grandparents’ journals and follow them through their trials and joys and gain for our own lives much from the experiences and faith and courage of our ancestors.

Your own private journal should record the way you face up to challenges that beset you. Do not suppose life changes so much that your experiences will not be interesting to your posterity.

I got out of my bed and dug around in my pashmina drawer, finally finding my journal buried under several lengths of cloth.  Pulling a pen out of a spiral notebook, I sat down and wrote a little.  It was a start.