Isaiah 39:8

Keeping A Diary

Note it in a book. Isaiah 30:8 (AV).

“Note it in a book,” says the text. Do you I wonder? Do any of you keep a diary spelt d-i-a-r-y, not d-a-i-r-y? Be sure to put the “i” before the “a.” Don't be like the boy I once knew. His English teacher wrote on the board as the subject for that week's essay “The advantages of keeping a diary.” Tom was a country boy and he had never heard of a diary, but he knew all about a dairy, so he wrote a splendid essay on cows, and milk, and cream, and butter, and cheese. But unfortunately it was not what the master wanted.

Now I should like all of you who are old enough to start keeping a diary. Most people keep a diary at some time in their life, and then drop it. But I want you to begin keeping one now, and I want you to go on keeping it all your days.

Shall I tell you why people generally tire of keeping a diary? They start out by being too ambitious. They get an elegantly-bound book with a large page marked off for each day in the year, and they try to fill that page. They find it takes too much of their precious time, so they miss out three or four days, and then they make a frantic effort to remember what happened in each of the blanks. They stick the facts hurriedly into the wrong dates. Then they weary of diary writing and push the book away to the back of a drawer.

That is the way not to do it. If you are going to do it at all, “little and steady” must be your method. Get a plain, note book. Don't divide it beforehand into spaces for the days, but each evening give five minutes to writing into it what you have done or seen that day. Note any interesting person you have met or any great public event that has taken place. You may even go the length of entering any fascinating or amusing story you have heard, but don't try to write down your thoughts and feelings. Leave these to be imagined!

You have no idea how useful a diary like that will be to you through life. For one thing it will make you accurate. For another it will help your memory. If a discussion arises as to when such-and-such happened you have only to look up your diary and the matter is settled. Then you will find it a tremendous aid when you come to write letters. Most of you know what a trial it is to sit down to write letters only to find you have nothing to say. If you are away from home or at school your letters will be twice as interesting to read if you have a diary whose pages you con before you begin. You had forgotten this and that, but the diary brought it back to you.

But a diary will do more for you than that. A great London preacher, the late Dr. Parker, tells the story of a boy who had begun to keep a diary. Someone chaffed him about it and asked what possible good a diary could do to anyone. “It might change a man's life,” said the boy. “How?” asked the friend. “Well, you see,” replied the boy, “when he comes to write in it at night he would say to himself, ‘What have I done today? ' And if he found he hadn't done anything he might go out and do something.” That boy was right. A diary may shame one into doing something worth recording.

And it will help to check your faults too. A certain little girl who was always late in the morning was the despair of her father and mother. Nothing and nobody could get her down to breakfast in time. She dawdled washing and dawdled dressing, she wasted precious minutes day after day, till her mother hit upon a brilliant plan. She bought a small red-covered note book and two pencils a black and a red. She presented these to Peggy, and she told her to note in the book each day when she got downstairs to breakfast, and to write in red pencil the mornings she was in time. Years afterwards, when Peggy was a big girl with her hair up, she came on that little notebook with its childish records of her bad habit. Most of the early entries were in black, but as the weeks passed the red ones grew more frequent. One or two began in red and ended in black, for they ran thus: “Was down in time for breakfast today, but the breakfast was ten minutes late!” May all our entries be as strictly honest as little Peggy's!

Boys and girls, I have been advising you to keep a diary, but I want you to remember this too that, whether you keep a diary or not, there is a diary being kept about you. It is written more regularly and more carefully and more truthfully than any diary you could write, and the things that are written in it would surprise nobody more than yourself. You will see that diary one day, for it is the diary of all your sayings and doings, and the thoughts and ideas that lie behind these sayings and doings. That conquered blaze of temper, that checked unkind word, that choked-down bitter feeling God has them all written in letters of gold.

Let us remember that diary often. Let us do what is right and noble and loving, so that we may each day give God something worthy to write of us in His book of our life.