How to Start a Faith Journal When You Don’t Know Where to Begin
Friend,
I’m writing this for the version of you who has the notebook open and the pen uncapped and no idea what is supposed to go on the first page. There is a particular kind of stuck that happens before a faith journal starts, and it isn’t laziness, and it isn’t a lack of faith. It’s the very specific paralysis of knowing that whatever you write first will set the tone for the rest, and not yet knowing what tone you can honestly take.
This is a letter on how to start a faith journal when you don’t know where to begin — the honest version, for the woman whose faith has weather and who needs the page to hold it. I want to give you the first page back. To say: it doesn’t have to declare anything. It doesn’t have to begin with a thesis statement about what you believe. The first page of a faith journal can be the page where you write down the questions you came in with, and that is enough.
The journal you’re looking for is not the certainty-aesthetic kind
There’s a flavour of faith journal that lives online. The neat handwriting, the verse calligraphed at the top of the page, the testimony already arrived at, the woman pictured smiling beside her open Bible at 6am. Some women genuinely keep journals like that and the journals are real and the faith is real. This isn’t a criticism of them.
But the journal that holds doubt is a different practice. It is the one most beginners actually need, because most beginners arrive at a faith journal not from a peak but from a question. From a season where prayer has gone thin. From a relationship with God that used to be loud and has gone quiet. From a Sunday morning that was full of the right answers and a Tuesday afternoon that wasn’t. The certainty-journal would be a kind of lie for that woman. The honest journal is the one she can actually keep.
This is for the honest one.
How to start a faith journal: what it actually is
A faith journal is the practice of writing to God about your faith — the part you can name, the part you can’t, the part that’s growing, the part that’s confused, the part that’s quiet, the part that’s loud. It is not a record of certainty. It is a record of relationship, and relationships have weather.
It is different from a prayer journal, which is mostly the practice of bringing requests and gratitudes. The faith journal is the practice of bringing the condition of your faith itself — the doubts, the renewals, the dry spells, the moments of unexpected sight — to the page where God can meet it. (If you also want the prayer-list side of the practice running on the same morning, how to start a prayer journal is the close cousin to this one.)
Both practices are good. They are not the same practice. You can keep one, the other, or both. The faith journal is the slower one, and the one this letter is for.
The second movement: what to put on the first page
You’re looking at a blank page and feeling that the first line has to mean something. It doesn’t.
Here is what the first page can hold, and any of these is enough.
A list of the questions you came in with. Where has God been the last two years? Why does prayer feel like it’s bouncing off the ceiling? Is the dryness my fault? Is it a season? Is it something else? Write the questions. Don’t try to answer them. The first page is allowed to be the page that holds the questions.
Or, a description of where your faith is right now. “My faith feels like a low fire. There’s heat but no flame. I know God is real because I’ve known Him to be real before, but right now I can’t feel it. I am here anyway.” That counts as a first page. That is a real prayer. The honest sentence is more devotional than a hundred eloquent ones written in a tone you don’t actually feel.
Or, the verse that brought you to the journal. The one that won’t leave you alone. Psalm 27. Lamentations 3:22-23. Mark 9:24 — “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.” Write the verse and then write what about it has been pulling at you. That’s enough for day one.
The page does not need to be more than this. Most attempts to start a faith journal that fail in the first week fail because the journaller asks the first page to perform a coherence the soul hasn’t yet arrived at. The first page is allowed to be the page that admits what is true. (If even the first sentence won’t come, what to write in a Christian journal when you feel blank is a gentle list of openings to borrow from.)
Pause. Notice your breath. Let it slow without forcing it.
There is a tightness in the chest that often comes when faith feels uncertain. You don’t have to resolve it before you write. You bring it to the page along with everything else.
The third movement: the page that holds the question
This is the heart of the faith journal — the page that holds the question without rushing to answer it.
Most faith struggles, in my experience, are not solved on the page they’re first written on. They are slowly outgrown on a hundred subsequent pages, after the question has had room to breathe. The journal’s first job is to let the question be in the room without panicking.
You write the question. “Why has prayer felt empty for six months?” You write what’s around the question — the contexts, the triggers, the worst version of the doubt and the milder one. You write what you’ve tried. You write what hasn’t helped. You write what is true about God that you still trust even when the feeling is gone.
And then you leave it there.
The next day you come back to the journal and you do not re-read yesterday’s page. You write today’s. The question is still there, on yesterday’s page, holding its own. The journal is doing its work in the background.
What you’ll find — and this is the slow miracle of the practice — is that questions held over weeks soften in ways questions argued with do not. The journal is patient with what your reasoning isn’t. It lets you keep walking with God in the middle of the question instead of refusing to walk until the question is resolved.
C. H. Spurgeon, writing about a kind of peace that arrived unannounced in the middle of a meditation, named what this slow practice eventually opens onto:
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Spurgeon, Till He Come
He didn’t manufacture the peace. He sat in the practice — meditating on what was true about God — and the peace arrived. The faith journal is the version of that for a season that’s longer than one evening. You sit with what is true about God, in writing, daily; and the peace does its own work in its own time.
The fourth movement: the simple daily format once you’ve started
After the first page, the journal settles into a small daily structure. Five sections. Same shape every day. By day fourteen the format disappears and the writing is what’s left.
- The opening line — “Lord, I come.” Or “Father, I’m here again.” One line of address.
- What is true about my faith today — one paragraph. The condition, not the performance. “My faith feels steadier than it did last week. I don’t know why.” Or “Today the doubt is louder than usual.”
- What I’m carrying that the faith touches — the situation in your life that your faith is being tested by, or steadied by, today. One paragraph.
- The verse or line I’m holding — one verse you want to keep near today. Write it out. Slowly.
- The closing line — “Lord, I bring all of it. Help my unbelief. Hold my faith. I am Yours.”
That’s the practice. Five honest minutes. The same shape on the days the faith is strong and the days it is thin. The constancy is itself a kind of faithfulness.
The fifth movement: how the journal grows with you
The first month of a faith journal is mostly weather. You write what is true today and what is true changes from day to day. That is fine. The journal is not a doctrinal statement. It is a record of your relationship with God across the seasons of your faith.
By month three you’ll notice patterns. The days the faith feels strong. The triggers for the harder days. The verses that have started to recur. The kind of language that has begun to feel like your prayer language, rather than borrowed from someone else’s.
By month six the doubts you started with will not necessarily have been answered. Some will have been. Others will have been replaced by deeper, better questions. A few will still be exactly where you left them on page one. That is also fine. The faith journal is not a problem-solving machine. It is a place to walk with God across the long terrain of belief. (If a small daily gratitude practice would steady the harder weeks, how to start a gratitude journal walks a slow-eye version that holds up alongside this one.)
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The journal that holds the question across 140 days
Once the daily structure has stuck and you want a journal that carries the practice through a season, the natural next step is one with a scripture pre-printed for each day and the five-section format already on the page.
That’s the Everspring New Christian Devotional. It was built for the woman who wants the question held, not answered too quickly — the woman who needs the journal to be patient with the seasons her faith goes through. The structure is the grace. The verse each day does the slow work of meeting her wherever she is on the page.
Friend, the first page is the hardest one. The second one is easier. By the tenth, the journal has become a place you trust. By the hundredth, you’ll look back at the first page and understand something you didn’t understand yet on the day you wrote it.
Start there.
Love,
The team at Everspring