God's goodness journal

By Phil McArdle

This past Christmas, my wife came up with some really incredible gift ideas for our kids. One of them was a journal in which our whole family would collaboratively write with the theme of recognizing God’s goodness in our day-to-day lives.

In practice, it’s very simple. Each night as we settle into the dinner table, Alexis (age 9) pulls out the God’s Goodness Journal and writes each of our names leaving a few blank lines before the next. We then take turns mentioning good things that happened throughout our day. It might be a compliment someone gave me, a fun activity at school, another new client at my wife’s business, a fabulous story we heard from a friend or a new word Skylar (18 months) learned to say. We come up with good things that happened in our own days and good things we experienced as a family.

My wife found the idea and started our journal, and Alexis pulls it out the majority of the time. But I think I’m the one who would miss it the most if we stopped. It’s great that something so simple could impact our family in so many ways. Time around the dinner table is pretty solid to begin with, but this journal definitely takes it up a notch. With the help of this journal, our new routine is discussion about positive things we are each excited about and connecting all of it to God’s movement in our lives and world.

It’s subtle, but I can definitely see how our time writing in our God’s Goodness Journal is not only giving us a better picture of who God is, but is also helping form our attitudes as we focus on the good around us.