why diary?

2013

I am an open book, as in when I write in my diary it is me, it is not a flowery prettified me, it is just me and most often me writing off the cuff, from the heart, about this journey and the situations I am in with occasional flashbacks. Being an open book in the abstract is easy, you write in your paper journal your innermost secrets and then hide it under the mattress. Having a blog diary is more, well it is just different and sometimes it makes you go back and look at sweeping statements you may have made.

So this morning before I start my wonderful day of study, I reflect on the journal entries made thus far in the Wesley time. And I feel some qualifying needs to be done.

I do care. I care if I am not acceptable on Friday evening, of course I do, to do otherwise would be a step back in time. Care was the wrong word to use. The correct phrasing should be “I am open to being rejected on Friday night because I understand I am not everybody’s cup of tea” and this of course goes for the next however many years.

As the perpetual wallflower, always in the background and happily there, I was not everyone’s cup of tea, so it is not that with this sudden God given boldness (in the biblical sense and in the Kerry sense too) I expected acceptance from every human. But it does depend on where you meet me. Take Friday, I was rushing to pick up a child when someone who needed to have someone listen came to me. Now if I was brash and off the cuff with them, I would have been no good to them so I put down my bags and sat on the floor with them and let them talk. My job, is employed servant of the King, and I use the Jesus model to meet people and yes there will be table toppling but there will also be leper kissing. This is not me boasting, this is me, life surrendered to the living God, all for Him.

The pulpit is not and never should be a soapbox, issues of the day can be explored, I am all in favour of that but people need to make their own minds, pray about how they should respond to a given situation. But diaries are another. John Wesley was a voluminous writer, he wrote tomes of books on many different subjects, but he also meticulously kept a diary and his theology and how it changed as he matured can be seen in its pages, he vented, he table toppled, he was criticised and vilified, called a fanatic but he was honest and open and he wore his heart on his sleeve and I follow his model of diary.

So this is me, warts and all, but sometimes I use the wrong word, or become soapboxy because of a situation. So for anyone reading, just imagine going under your sister’s bed and finding her diary and reading, that is what this is. Deeply personal and honest but published because I no longer keep my secrets. Oh and God loves me too!