So I wanted a good excuse to use the word “annals” in an everyday scenario. Like some other favorites that I rarely have the pleasure of using in everyday life: interstitial, acerbic, bifurcated.
My journal keeps me.
These annals are the volumes I have written since about 1995 and kept in watertight boxes starting around 2010 when I realized that these might be the only thing I’ve generated that are worth fighting over once I’m gone. I don’t really keep a journal, I suppose it keeps me. I write because I am compelled to write. I’ve written 4-5 times per week for over 20 years now. The books are full of random thoughts, reactions to the things I’m reading, sometimes sprinkled with a paragraph of real life happenings, lists of things I’ve captured so they don’t distract me, bad poetry and even worse violent spewing of emotional stuff from way down in there. Scribbles, sketches, and doodles make their way onto the page, and so does typography spawned by the illumination of a word or phrase onto my heart. For this reason, I prefer plain pages over lined.
For me, faith is . . .
This was a prompt in one of the books I’m reading right now. I appreciate you authors out there who include open questions to engage the half awake reader. Here was my answer:
For me, faith is the movement of my inner being, propelled by the force of affection, measured in heaps of God’s faithfulness, weightily bearing its own confidence in what it cannot see but in fact, knows. It is unhindered by fear. Its purity determines the deftness with which I act. My faith is a living thing, an animal that thrives or shrivels, based on my care and feeding of it. I’m fairly certain it’s been defibrillated at least once. It is mysterious and other-worldly, like an exotic pet from one of Shaun Tan’s books. But it’s most certainly mine.
How would you answer the question?
So much love for this.