Published by Good Book Company on September 1, 2022
Genres: Non-Fiction, Christian Life
Bullet-style devotional journal that will encourage you in your Christian faith.
This 365-day devotional journal brings a unique combination of creativity, reflection and structure into your daily walk with God.
Just like a bullet journal, it includes monthly, weekly and daily sections, creative prompts, space for sermon notes and doodling, habit trackers and blank dot pages for extra journaling, lists or notes.
The first six months of Bible-based creative prompts cover Psalm 103, an amazing psalm full of imagery describing God’s vastness, character and loving care. The second six months look at Ephesians 1:1-14, which explores what happens to us when we are united to this great, vast, loving God through Jesus. These prompts will help you to meditate and reflect on God’s word and find new delight in Jesus.
This spiritual journal will also help you to:
• connect your creativity with your faith
• maintain consistent habits of Bible-reading and prayer
• remember what you learned in sermons or quiet times
• reflect more actively on your personal journey with the Lord
So use this innovative resource to be creative, organized and intentional in your spiritual life. Makes a beautiful gift.
At the beginning of this journal, Sophie Killingley explains that during a time when she was struggling with her mental health, she started doodling or lettering Bible verses as a way to still maintain a daily devotional time when she couldn’t handle much else. She discovered that connecting creativity with her spiritual habits was very helpful, and designed journal-style handouts for people to take notes on during her husband’s sermons at the church where they minister. This led to her creating Draw Near: Your Creative Spiritual Journal, which provides guided artistic prompts, monthly spiritual habit trackers, and weekly journal pages for people to fill out as they read Scripture, pray, and attend church.
As she explains in the introduction, everyone can adapt their use to their personal priorities and interest level, and you don’t have to be artistically gifted to be creative. She encourages her readers to use this guided journal as a way to connect with God and enjoy His gift of creativity, and I have enjoyed getting started with it. This brought back good memories of my Sunday school teacher from fifth and sixth grade, who welcomed doodling during her lessons and regularly let us do skits to illustrate the Bible stories we were studying. It’s easy for adults to think of creativity as being childish, distracting, or irreverent, and this journal is a refreshing reminder that creative expression has spiritual value for all ages.
The only reason why I am giving this product four stars instead of five is because I wish the pages were thicker. They’re not flimsy at all, and would be a nice weight for a book, but you can see some of the darkly printed letters through from one page to another, and pen inks and markers will show through some, even if they don’t bleed. The monthly pages with things to illustrate and habit-trackers to color back up to grid paper, so bleed-through is less of a concern there, but ink will be visible from through weekly page to the next. I hope that this will change for future editions, because even though it would raise the production cost and price point, a journal that invites doodling and writing in colorful ink pens needs thicker paper.