If you study and ponder religious or otherwise uplifting material, you may have a place where you write down your insights and deep reflections. I wish I had done this sooner. For a long time, my own ‘study’ looked more like reading with occasional pondering. My spiritual study was greatly enhanced when I decided to start writing down both what stood out to me, and the thoughts that came to my mind while studying.
While GoldMind was also built for guided journaling, this article is focused on how you can use GoldMind to create a spiritual study journal that maximizes the benefits of recording and reflecting on spiritual truths. GoldMind’s note-taking features were designed specifically for introspection and pondering and will help you to more effectively capture and learn from what you study.
Why Have A Spiritual Study Journal?
“Write down in a secure place the important things you learn from [God]. You will find that as you write down precious impressions, often more will come. Also, the knowledge you gain will be available throughout your life.” – Richard G. Scott
A spiritual study journal is a place where you write down what you’re learning as you study spiritual things. You could be recording passages that stick out to you, quotes that move you, questions that need answers, and inspiration that comes to you about what these things could mean for you. It’s a place where you can reflect on your life, decisions, and who you are.
Writing makes studying spiritual things so much more effective than simply pondering ideas in your head because it slows down and focuses your mind for deep thinking. With spiritual learning, you’re seeking to integrate and apply ideas to your life with the goal of changing the way you think and live.
You need to be able to sit with an idea and explore it, formulate questions, and visualize application. Writing is uniquely capable of helping you do this because putting your thoughts into words aids your focus and allows you to thoroughly explore ideas and take thoughts to their conclusion without getting distracted.
But the power of a study journal doesn’t just come while you’re writing in it. Additional power comes from going back and reviewing what you’ve studied to remind yourself of previous insights and build on them with new ones.
Organizing your impressions, insights, and reflections by topic will make them more accessible to you and increase your opportunities to benefit further from what you’ve written long afterwards. GoldMind was built to help with that.
Organize Your Study Journal By Topic
How you treat insights and impressions is a statement of how much you value them.
Organizing your spiritual notes by topic allows you to find everything you’ve recorded on a given subject in the same place. Important notes become more accessible when you don’t have to sift through everything just to find the ones that deal with a particular subject. Being able to easily review many quotes, insights, impressions, and reflections on the same topic helps you solidify and deepen your understanding of a given subject and build on what you’ve gathered.
As you continuously add notes to your topically organized study journal, the insights you’ve recorded on any given topic will become an ever-growing wealth of truth to draw on when needed. My Spiritual Notebook in GoldMind has become extremely valuable to me due to all of the truths, deep pondering, and reflection I have stored and organized there.
Organizing your insights makes them more accessible for review and further learning. Here are some ways GoldMind makes this easy and effective:
- With GoldMind, you can add a quick note at any time to immediately record important spiritual ideas. Once you’ve captured a note, you can tag it with whatever Topic(s) it applies to.
- You may have a quote or passage that relates to more than one principle. In GoldMind, you can add however many Topics you choose to any note to find it under that Topic later. This helps you avoid needing to copy and paste things into multiple places. E.g., if you have a quote that deals with faith AND prayer, simply add both Topics to the note so you can find it under both.
- You may want to store and find quotes by the same person, which is possible by simply creating Topics for the individuals you gather quotes from. Having every quote tagged with the author and the Topic it applies to makes it easy to find all quotes by a particular person in addition to finding all quotes on a given topic. I have separate notebooks in GoldMind for ‘Spiritual’ and ‘People’, which helps make any given notebook less crowded. How you organize your notes is up to you!
To help paint a picture of the kinds of things your ‘Spiritual’ Notebook might have in it, here is a list of some of the Topics I have in mine: Agency, Being Intentional, Conversion, Effort, Faith, God’s Timing, Humility, Identity, etc. Whenever my study takes me across something that relates to a Topic in my Spiritual Notebook, I just create a note with what I want to record and tag it with the appropriate Topic.
Reflect on Quotes and Passages
Spiritual study journals are for reflecting on other people’s thoughts to make them your own. Over time, your understanding of a quote or insight may change and evolve.
After you store a quote, impression, or any other idea you want to reflect on as a note in GoldMind, you can add entries to reflect on it over time. These entries are kept separate from one another to help you see how your thinking has changed over time. I enjoy recording quotes and scripture passages that mean a lot to me. With GoldMind, I can come back later, remind myself of previous insights, and add new ones.
Future Features For Deep Reflection
Because GoldMind is quite new, there are many exciting features that have not been built yet that will further enhance your spiritual study.
- The mobile app will be released in the coming months, helping you to capture and reflect on insights wherever you are.
- Scheduling regular reviews of Topics will allow GoldMind to automatically bring up notes on whatever Topics you choose as often as you would like to review them. This will help ensure that you are not letting insights fade away and become forgotten.
- In the future, you will be able to create your own writing exercises with powerful questions you come up with. Questions are key to spiritual growth, and as you come up with the ones you know you need to answer, GoldMind will help you reflect on them often.
Try using GoldMind for your spiritual study journal and see how it helps you to get the most out of your spiritual learning!
