A Journal Book for the Young Woman Figuring Out Her Faith
⏱ 9 min read
To the young woman figuring it out,
I’m writing this to the young woman who is somewhere in the middle of working it out. The faith you grew up with — if you grew up with one — has started to feel like a hand-me-down. Some of it still fits. Some of it doesn’t, or doesn’t anymore, or never quite did and you just hadn’t noticed yet because nobody around you was asking.
You are not in crisis. You are not walking away. You are just in the slow, quiet, sometimes embarrassing season of figuring out what you actually believe, on your own, in your own voice, with God in the room.
This is a letter about a journal book for the young woman figuring out her faith. Not a workbook with the right answers waiting at the back. Not a fill-in-the-blank Bible study that tells you what you should have written by the time you finish. Just a page that can hold the questions while you’re still asleep at the wheel of having answers to them.
I want to tell you what that journal is actually for, what it isn’t, and the way of using it that survives a real year.
What the journal is actually for
It is for the sentences you cannot yet say out loud.
The sentence about the doubt you’ve been having and don’t know how to bring up in your small group. The sentence about the part of your testimony that you’ve started to suspect you exaggerated. The sentence about the friend you can’t believe is still going to that church. The sentence about the way you used to feel God and you haven’t in a while and you don’t know if the absence is a season or a sign.
The journal book for the young woman figuring out her faith is not a place to perform spiritual maturity. It is a place to be unfinished, on paper, with God reading over your shoulder and not flinching.
If you’ve been told that real faith doesn’t have doubts in it, that is one of the more damaging things the church sometimes says to a young woman. Scripture is full of doubt. Lord, I believe — help my unbelief. That is a sentence a father said to Jesus in Mark 9, and Jesus didn’t correct him. He answered the prayer. The doubt was already part of the faith. It was not a disqualification from it.
The journal is where you get to say that out loud, on the page, in your own voice, without anyone reaching for a Bible verse to fix you with.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a place to be impressive. It isn’t a place where the writing has to sound like the writing of a real Christian. It isn’t a record you’ll show anyone. It isn’t a thing you have to be consistent about every single day in the same shape forever, or it stops counting.
It’s also not the thing that is going to settle your faith for you. Christ settles your faith. The journal is one of the places you walk slowly toward Him in.
If you’ve started a journal three times and stopped, that wasn’t a discipline problem. It was usually a format problem — the journals you bought wanted you to be someone you aren’t yet. They asked you to fill in one thing I learned about God today on a morning when the honest answer was nothing, I didn’t open my Bible, I scrolled. And then they made you feel behind for not having something to write. So you closed the journal and didn’t go back.
A journal that survives this season is one that lets the honest answer be the honest answer.
Pause for a moment.
Notice where your shoulders are right now.
If they’re up by your ears — the way a lot of young women carry the am I doing this right feeling — let them come down. Just a little. Not to perform calm. Just to give your body a moment of not being braced. The body has been holding the question along with the mind. Let the chest open by an inch.
That’s the whole opening practice. The journal is not going to demand more from you than your body can give right now.
What I’d actually have you write in it
I have a small format for you, not because formats are sacred, but because a format saves you from the blank-page panic that ends most journals by week three.
Five things. None of them require you to sound spiritual.
1. What’s true today. Two or three sentences about the actual day. What happened. How you felt. What you’re carrying into the page. The journal cannot help you with what is in you until you’ve named what is in you.
2. The thing you’re trying to work out. This is the heart of the journal book for the young woman figuring out her faith. The question. The doubt. The thing your roommate said that you’re still thinking about. The verse that didn’t land. The friend whose faith looks different from yours that you’re trying to understand. Write the question. You don’t have to answer it.
3. One verse you actually read. Just one. Not a chapter. Not a devotional reading plan you’re behind on. One verse — open to Psalm 27, Psalm 139, Romans 8, John 14, John 15, and pick one line that doesn’t pass through you. Write it out by hand. Slow. The handwriting is part of the prayer.
4. What you’d say to God if you were being honest. Not what you’d pray in front of anyone. The actual honest version. I don’t know. I’m tired of pretending. I want to want You more than I do. Thank You for the small thing today. Three sentences is enough. The honesty matters more than the eloquence.
5. One small thing you’re going to do tomorrow. Not a grand resolution. One small thing. Open the Bible before the phone. Text the friend back. Skip the scroll for ten minutes before bed. The journal is not just a place to think — it’s a place to land one small motion toward Him.
That’s it. Five sections. Twelve to fifteen minutes on a normal evening. Less on a hard one. More on a Sunday afternoon when something has come unstuck.
If you do the five sections four or five times a week, by the end of three months you will have a record of the slow conversation God has been having with you that you couldn’t see while you were inside it. The journal is the room where the slow conversation gets to be visible.
(If a younger sister or a friend is asking what to do for daily writing of a different shape, the 52 weekly journal prompts for teen girls walk one prompt per week through a whole year — slower than this, longer-form, the same honest voice.)
What Chambers said about this exact season
Oswald Chambers wrote, in My Utmost for His Highest, about the trust that does not yet have its full reasons together, but is the right posture for the figuring-out year:
“Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”
— Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest
Notice what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t say faith requires you to understand. He doesn’t say faith is the absence of questions. He says faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God — which is a confidence you can hold even on the page where the question hasn’t been answered yet. The journal is where the deliberate confidence gets practiced. You write the question. You write the unknown. You write I trust You with this, even though I don’t see how it works. That sentence is itself a faith sentence. The journal is full of those.
On the harder days
There will be days when you sit down to write and the page feels accusatory. You haven’t read your Bible. You haven’t prayed in a real way. You don’t feel close to God. You are not sure if you even want to. You think about closing the journal.
Don’t.
Open it. Write the date. Write today is one of the hard ones. Write the one true sentence you can manage. Close the journal.
That counts. That is the practice. The faith that survives a real life is built on the days when you showed up to the page anyway and wrote the one sentence — not on the days when you wrote three pages of beautiful, settled belief. (For the longer season when the absence of feeling has gone on for months and you’re starting to wonder, the honest recommendations for teen-girl devotionals include the small daily structure built for exactly that stretch, and the Tuesday Bible guide walks the I haven’t opened it in weeks return.)
On the better days
You will also have days — weeks, sometimes — where the writing flows, the verse lands, the question gets a partial answer, and you feel something shift. Notice those days. Read them back later, on the hard ones. The journal is also a record of evidence — that He has been here before, that He met you in the writing, that you have not been making the whole thing up.
The young woman figuring out her faith is not a young woman who has failed at faith. She is a young woman who is taking her faith seriously enough to ask it real questions. The journal is one of the places that work happens.
(If you have a friend whose faith is on the steady side of yours and you’d like to compare practices, the gifts beyond the wall decor list names some of the slower ways the women around you are quietly building theirs.)
The Everspring journal for the young woman figuring it out
The journal I’ve described above is the spine of what we built into the Everspring Devotional for Teen Girls. One scripture each day, room for the honest paragraph, a small gratitude section, a one-line prayer, a small place to land the what I’m going to do tomorrow motion. Built for the young woman whose faith is real and unfinished and worth tending — not for the version of her she thinks she should already be.
It is the format of this letter, made into a daily companion, so the page you sit down at tomorrow already has a shape and you don’t have to invent one from scratch on a tired Tuesday.
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With love, from someone who was the young woman figuring it out once too, and now writes journals for the ones who are doing the same.
