Would you like to take a journey and see how God has brought you to where you are today? Sharon Witty provides a practical yet spiritually powerful tip for drawing us ever deeper into Divine Love.
On Sunday, August 26, I realized the deadline loomed for my post to The Well blog. As I thought about what to write, the song “Sentimental Journey,” recorded by Doris Day in 1965, sang in my head.
Gonna take a sentimental journey … to renew old memories …
I thought of the journey each of us walks every day — a journey we began the second we were born, our spiritual journey. In Jeremiah 1:5a, God says, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”
Two years ago, my spiritual director encouraged me to journal my spiritual journey.
How often I’ve heard it said we need to know our past in order to understand our present, so I took her advice. I got out a journal and a pen and began writing. I was amazed at how my writing revealed to me God’s presence in my life, how God had been with me through the years, keeping a hand upon me without my even being aware.
I remembered the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass when I was a high school junior. After Mass, my parents and sister had gone to the car ahead of me. When I came out of church, snow was falling and the stars sparkled in the cloudless, night black sky. I was aware of no one, only of God’s presence and the peace enveloping me. God’s hand on my life? Oh, yes.
Fast forward twenty years, and I see myself sitting with some fifteen other women in an ecumenical, charismatic prayer group.
I had not wanted to attend this group, but my children’s day care provider kept haranguing me to go with her, so I decided I’d go “just once.” Then maybe she’d leave me alone.
It only took “once” for me to want the joy and peace those women had. There among those Spirit filled women I realized my first major conversion into a personal relationship with Jesus. God’s hand on my life? Oh, yeah.
And so it went as I continued to write and realize God loved me so much the Holy One constantly has had a hand on me, drawing me ever deeper into Divine Love.
Now I must return to my journal and continue to write and “see” God’s hand on my life.
What about you? Would you like to take a journey to see how God has brought you to where you are today, to renew those memories of God’s presence? Then get out a journal and pen or sit down at the keyboard, pray and begin writing. Oh, and, by the way, grammar, spelling and punctuation don’t count!
Blessings.
 | Sharon Witty, mother of two and grandmother of four, lives in Marshalltown. When her husband of 32 years died 17 years ago, she was devastated. Looking back on these years, she thinks of two things: the poem “Footprints in the Sand” and the Paschal mystery. She admits that only through God’s carrying her many times has she been able to rise above the devastation. She also admits she has gone through many small deaths and risen to new life during these years. Consequently, her being able to trust the Holy Spirit has increased. She prays it continue to do so. |