... I am going out shortly to buy myself a nice new book to use as a reflective journal!

For the first two or three years of my engineering career, I had to maintain a 'training log book' - essentially a journal, writing about what I had learned each week and, in the parlance of nowadays, reflecting.  It was sometimes fun and sometimes a chore, and I did it dutifully, meeting training requirements and working towards the professional qualifications I still pay good money to maintain.

When I began studying theology they made us keep a reflective journal - but at least it was pretty much free-form, whatever struck you and whatever reflections arose.  I still have that bundle of A4 paper, with doodles, hymn words, prayers, postcards and miscellaneous outpourings of my journey through the MRC process to be allowed to start training for ministry.

So four more years of journalling through college, some free-form and personal in a notebook; some pastoral cycle and assessed, hand-written and then typed up...  Then three years of compulsory weekly reflections for my NAM period...  Then another four for what was meant to be a part time DPT but ended up an MPhil, one of which coincided with a year of doing it online for a training module on mentoring (something I've been well and truly over-trained in!).  Some overlaps for sure, but at least a decade of being made to keep journals.

A girl can have enough!  So for the last couple of years I have ceased keeping a reflective journal around ministry/church/spiritual stuff - which has been good, I needed a break (I do have a very private 'cancer journey' journal running to around a hundred sides of A4 typing so I guess I never quite stopped). 

Now, after a decent break, I feel the lack - the discipline of sitting down once a week for an hour or two to look back over what I've been doing, what hints of God's influence I can spot, what things I have learned about myself or others or the 'job', etc., is something I need to restore.  Not in a legalistic way.  Not rigidly following a pastoral cycle or any other model.  Not nicely formed.  Including doodles and diagrams and pictures and postcards.  With prayers and outpourings.  And of course, for once, no-one will be reading it except me (well, and God, obviously).  No-one will be checking to see if I have understood a method properly.  No-one is assessing my competence as a reflective practitioner.  It will be my journal: MINE!  And I am looking forward to it.

All of which means the self-indulgence of a trip to Paper Chase (other fancy stationers available) to buy a lovely notebook  in which to scribble, write, draw 'stuff' and, by dint of that to continue to learn and grow.  There, I said it - now I just have to do it!