Whale Breath

In looking back at old journals, I found one entry that had a goal of writing in my journal once a week! These pages have shaped me, changed me. They are like whale breath, voluntary but essential. I have thought for a while that the writing of them helps me to listen—and to remember, or if I don’t remember, as a way to be reminded. I remember once years ago I gathered up everything I thought You had spoken to me through others and wrote it all out, but the emotional result was depression, not joy. It puzzled me then, I never understood that. And I have been reluctant to do that kind of exercise since. So the fruit of that effort was not nourishing. Can You help me understand why?

Those were all words other people said to you in My Name, interspersed with what you had sensed on your own. This was a time when “hearing from God” was hard for you and you relied mostly on others, and frankly what you received wasn’t enough. Some of those entries were a sentence or two. You were starving by then, and you had to wade through a lot of mud, a lot of “hard times” entries to get to even those morsels of Me. It wasn’t My true words to you that depressed you. It was the clinging residual of those times that depressed you.

Think about your prayer vision experience, in February 1992. That brought incredible joy. That brought abundance of assurance. That experience changed your life with Me. That was the turning point, the watershed experience. That was a foretaste of how you live now, and its legacy is all good.