How to Keep a Prayer Journal

A prayer journal is a written record of your prayers. That is the whole of it. What you asked for, when you asked, who you were carrying, and — in time — what came of it.

Christians have kept them for as long as they have had paper. Augustine's Confessions is a prayer journal that got out of hand. John Wesley kept a diary in cipher so that he could be honest in it. The practice survives because it does something ordinary prayer struggles to do on its own: it gives prayer a memory.

Most people who try a prayer journal stop within a month. Not for lack of devotion — because they started with the wrong expectations about what the thing is for. This guide is written to prevent that.

Why keep one at all

Three reasons, in order of how much they matter.

It makes prayer specific. Spoken prayer drifts toward the general — bless my family, help me be better. Writing resists this. A sentence has to land somewhere. You find yourself naming the actual thing: not "bless my family" but "help me not to be short with Daniel this week."

It gives you a record to look back on. This is the reason people stay. Six months in, you read an entry from the spring and find you cannot remember being that frightened. The thing that was going to swallow you did not. You would never have known that, because anxiety does not keep receipts and memory quietly edits. The journal does not edit.

It slows you down. Handwriting runs at perhaps twenty words a minute. Thought runs faster than that. The gap is where attention lives, and a great deal of prayer is simply the discipline of staying still long enough to mean it.

What you need

Very little, and the temptation to buy your way in is the first thing to resist.

• Somewhere to write — a notebook, a document, an app. The format matters far less than the habit.
• Ten minutes. Not thirty. Ten minutes you will actually keep beats thirty you will abandon by Thursday.
• A fixed time and place. Attached to something you already do without deciding to: after coffee, before the commute, once the house is quiet.

That last point is the one that determines whether you are still doing this in March. A practice that depends on remembering will be forgotten. A practice welded to an existing habit will not.

How to start

Date every entry. Not decoration — the whole answered-prayer discipline depends on it. An undated journal is a pile of thoughts; a dated one is a record.

Begin with one week, not one year. Tell yourself you are trying this for seven days. The vow to journal daily for a year is broken on day nine and abandoned in shame on day ten.

Write to God, not about him. The difference is everything. I am frightened about the results on Thursday is prayer. I have been reflecting on the nature of fear is an essay. Journals die when they turn into essays.

Leave the last page of each entry open. Physically leave white space, or in an app, expect to come back. That space is where you will later write what happened. Without it, the answered-prayer half of the practice never gets built.

Let it be ugly. Unfinished sentences, crossings-out, one line on a bad morning. Nobody is reading it. The instinct to write well is the instinct that kills the habit, because writing well is effortful and you will not always have the effort.

Four formats that work

You do not need a format. But on the mornings when nothing comes, a structure is the difference between an entry and a blank page.

ACTS

Four movements: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Praise, then honesty, then gratitude, then asking. The order is the point — it puts your requests last, after you have remembered who you are speaking to. The oldest and most reliable of the four.

The three-column list

Rule three columns: the request, the date asked, what came of it. Austere, and unmatched for seeing God's faithfulness laid out in a form you cannot argue with. Best kept alongside a prose journal rather than instead of one.

Scripture-first

Read a short passage, write the verse that caught you, then pray it back. This is journalling and Scripture meditation in the same ten minutes, and it solves the blank-page problem permanently — the passage always gives you somewhere to begin.

The examen

Ignatius' evening review, written down. Where was God today? Where did I turn away? What am I grateful for? What do I need for tomorrow? Suited to people who cannot face a journal in the morning, and there are more of us than admit it.

What to actually write

The commonest objection is I do not know what to put. Some starting points:

• The thing you are most anxious about right now. Name it precisely — precision is where the relief is.
• People, by name. Not "my colleagues" but "Rachel, who has not looked well for a fortnight."
• One thing you are thankful for that you had not noticed until you looked for it.
• What you are avoiding. Journals are unusually good at surfacing this, because you cannot get away with vagueness on paper.
• A verse, and what you do not understand about it. Honest confusion is prayer.
• The same thing as yesterday. Repetition is not failure. Some prayers take years.

The part nobody warns you about

At some point — usually around week three — you will feel nothing. The writing will go flat, the words will sound hollow, and you will conclude you are doing it wrong.

You are not. Every serious writer on prayer, from the desert fathers to Teresa of Ávila to the pastor down the road, describes this. Teresa called it dryness and treated it as ordinary weather rather than a verdict.

The response is unglamorous: write anyway, and write shorter. Three lines on a dry morning keeps the practice alive. Waiting until you feel like it hands the decision to your mood, and your mood will not give it back.

Keeping it going

Re-read on the first of the month. Ten minutes with last month's entries. This is where the practice pays out, and it is the step almost everyone skips.

Mark what has been answered. A circle, a tick, a line in the margin. See the answered prayer journal for how to build this into something you can actually look back through.

Do not backfill. Missed four days? Start today. Reconstructing the week you missed turns a prayer journal into homework, and homework gets abandoned.

Keep it private. A journal written with a reader in mind is not a journal. This matters more than it sounds: the moment you imagine an audience, the honesty goes, and the honesty was the point.

Common questions

How often should I write in a prayer journal?

As often as you will actually keep up. Daily is the traditional shape, but three considered entries a week that continue for a year are worth far more than fourteen days of daily writing followed by silence. Start at a frequency that feels slightly too easy.

What should I write in a prayer journal?

Whatever you would say to God if you were speaking. Requests, thanks, confession, confusion, the names of people you are carrying, and the plain facts of what is happening to you. If you are stuck, a structure such as ACTS — adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication — gives you four places to begin.

Is a prayer journal biblical?

There is no command to keep one, but the pattern runs through Scripture. The Psalms are very largely written prayer — petition, complaint, thanksgiving and praise, set down and kept. Habakkuk is told to write the vision and make it plain. The practice is an application of something Scripture does constantly rather than an invention laid on top of it.

Should I write by hand or type?

Handwriting is slower, which is usually an advantage, and there is evidence it aids recall. Typing is searchable, portable and private behind a password, which matters if you live with other people and want to write honestly. Neither is more spiritual. Choose the one you will not have an excuse to skip.

What do I do with old prayer journals?

Re-read them, which is the whole reason for keeping them. Some people destroy old volumes for privacy, and that is a legitimate choice — but do it after re-reading, not instead. The record of what God has done is the most valuable thing the practice produces.

I have missed a fortnight. Do I start again?

Start today, and do not reconstruct the fortnight. Gaps are part of every long-kept journal; the entry after a gap is often among the most honest, because something usually caused the gap and it is worth naming.