I first found out about Bible journaling in 2016. I wanted to reorganise my life, as I felt at the time I was unproductive. So after doing some research, I found the Bullet journal community.
What is Bullet Journaling? According to bulletjournal.com, “the Bullet Journal is a customisable and forgiving organisation system. It can be your to-do list, sketchbook, diary, and notebook, but most likely, it will be all of the above. It will teach you to do more with less.”
I immediately started utilising the system and discovered it to be so creative and was instantly hooked. I planned to purchase a special kind of notebook (Leuchtturm 1917 Medium Size Hardcover A5 Notebook) to do my journaling. After some searching and thinking, I decided to make one for me, as I am a graphic artist but not an actual artist who draws so creatively.
Shortly after making the decision, my pastor was leaving Montserrat and I wanted to give her a gift that I knew she could treasure. I remember President Obama once saying that giving an adult a gift can be very hard because if they desire something, they will most likely buy it for themselves. With that in mind, I set about making my pastor a gift in the form of a bullet journal. It was an unforgettable journey.
Lessons learnt from that project:
- It could be extremely expensive to create one living on my Caribbean island of Montserrat.
- I learnt to physically bind a book by hand and make it look factory-made.
- You have to discover creative ways of thinking in order to get simple tasks done.
Living on this island can be a struggle at times. It is small not only in size but also in population, so finding stuff for crafts can present quite a challenge. We do not have any craft shops and the local dollar stores that you find in developed countries. Cheap items used for crafts can cost as much as 10 times the standard price. So I had to revert to designing all of it digitally and then print the whole book. It came out as two books, each containing 450 pages. It was by far one of my best productions.
As I continued researching bullet journaling, I discovered “The Miracle Morning,” a book written by Hal Rod. It is presently a full movement. The Miracle Morning deals with making the most of your morning before 8 a.m. It talks about waking up an hour before your usual wake-up time. Hal shares the Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life… (Before 8 AM).
I also found Bible journaling as people were looking for answers to various questions about it in the bullet journal forums. I decided to do a Google search and was amazed by the vast number of posts written about it. I saw people colouring and drawing in their bibles. I did not want to go into that. I also proudly told myself I did not have that special journaling bible I saw so many people using. It was not until earlier this year (2018) that I received an email from www.Biblejournaling.com inviting me to be a part of this year’s Flourish Bible Journaling Conference. It was held online for five days. Attending that conference made me rethink waiting for a special bible to start my journaling.
This cool walk with Bible journaling down Montserrat’s winding road has encouraged me to create a blog. One that I can use to contribute to the Bible journal from my viewpoint. I have become a member of so many groups and rarely find Caribbean people in those groups. Having this blog, I hope my family, friends, and their friends and associates can be encouraged to discover a creative way of digging into God’s words. Before bible journaling, I struggled a lot with reading my bible on a daily basis, and I know many other Christians who confess to having that struggle. I wanted to develop a regular Bible study time. After attending the conference, I was encouraged to start with what I have and not wait for any particular resources to begin.
In my next blog post, I will supply a list of tools that got me started.