One of the things I loved and still love to do is write diaries....
I don't know how many people write diaries but even as a young girl I loved to write these 'secret' notes in 'my diary'...the notes were often a source of shame and embarrassment with an inquisitive little brother reading aloud, my sometimes 'irreverent' thoughts penned down in the book that for me was just a notch below the Bible...a tirade of questions, a massive fist fight, warnings from Amma and some tears later the diary would be returned to its rightful owner for safekeeping away from the prowling eyes of the brat....
sometimes the diary entries would not be publicly read out but would be used as a threat....Do this or I will spill the beans....and the goody two shoes that i was I never did want to get into trouble....well, i mean who does?
At one point it was such an addiction that I would write on any page I found and often forget to tear them, leaving the world to read my anxious thoughts....it pained me when the 'world' read and laughed....my mother gently chiding me not to leave my 'thoughts' lying around!
I remember this particular incident, when a cousin staying with us, coolly read my diary and then in all earnestness went and reported to my mother about my first crush (perhaps she feared that I would elope with the fellow!)....Amma ofcourse handled it with her signature style...Cool Head and Hard Hitting Words....I still remember my eyes stinging with tears while wishing for a safe secret place for my diary.
The diary was often a gift from Amma, one from the many diaries that she got as a New Year gift at the office. These usually had 'Bank of XYZ' or 'ABC Co Ltd' emblazoned on the cover, sometimes with Ma's name embossed to add that 'special customer-is queen' touch to an otherwise boring looking book which would slip away into oblivion under the piles of files on any table.It was a nondescript, mostly maroon/brown rexine bound book, the first 50 pages of which were usually filled with irrelevant-to-my-teen-mind, phone numbers of police, fire stations, banks,branches of banks etc..etc..etc.
Writing diaries started as a way to admire my own handwriting....to write pages and pages of neat gibberish that made complete sense to me, then it began to feature in my list of 'hobbies' ...that actually helped me handle awkward conversations with people I didn't know. Sample this:
Appa and Amma at a get together introduce me to a girl they want me to be friends with (you know how parents can be....'Go play with her' they would say....as if we had known each other forever..).
Girl (daddy's friend's brother's cousin's friend's daughter) : Hi! I am EneyWon
Me: Yeah! Hi!...hmm,umm!...what are your hobbies?
Girl: Singing, Dancing...painiting
Me: I love to write diaries....
Girl: Oh! wow!....
And the conversation flows.....
Soon it became a thrill to own your very own secret...eventually though, after i realised that my 'privacy' was threatened by my curious little sibling and at the advice of Mother dearest who feared that my silly and harmless stories and idiotic imagination would be fodder for many unnecessary conversations at home , I decided to give up on diary writing.....it lasted for some time until I resumed diary writing this time with adequate 'safety measures' like picking up the most boring looking diary and starting the page with 'Dear Jesus' and not 'Dear diary', hiding it behind a pile of lingerie and away from prying eyes....(he wouldn't look at girly stuff anyway!!!).....
With the passage of time, the entries underwent a transformation....I would write pages and pages...'Dear God,today was a good day/sad day...I began sharing.my disappointments, loneliness, grief, anger, happy things, scary things....often as I wrote, I felt a voice chiding me if I were moping in self-pity, or humbling me if I had my head in the clouds......and diary writing transformed into recording prayers...."dear Jesus" became a more meaningful entry and topics ranged from the sundry to the serious....sometimes after a couple of months of writing an entry, I would read it to find that the issue had been sorted appropriately....From the petty to the most profound....I had never known a God who was so interested in the details....something miraculous was happening....I knew this because I was recording this in the diary....prayers were being answered and I was being transformed......
I still find it extremely liberating to write a Prayer diary....though i don't write regularly (There are no prying eyes, they've grown up and have their own prayer requests, I'm sure) and I recommend it to you...write down your prayer request, however simplistic or sophisticated and submit it to God and then when you flip through those pages, you will see His faithfulness....
However there are some things I don't write about, things I cannot express.....but even when I don't ' record', I rest assured, that He knows what what's written on my heart!
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