How to Start a Prayer Journal
How to start a prayer journal: take a notebook, a pen, and one page divided into two columns — what you asked, and the date you asked it. Everything else is optional. Write one prayer today, leave the right-hand column empty, and come back to it when something changes.
Most guides make this harder than it is. This one is for the woman who has bought the notebook twice and never made it past the first week.
Why a prayer journal is different from a diary
A diary records what happened. A prayer journal records what you asked for and what came back.
That second part is the whole point. Prayer is easy to forget — not the praying, the having prayed. You ask for something in February, and by June you have moved on to asking for something else, and you never notice that the February thing quietly resolved.
The journal is the noticing.
There is a verse that is nothing but an instruction to write things down.
Habakkuk 2:2 — And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.
Write it plain. Not beautifully. Plain.
How to start a prayer journal in five steps
1. Get a notebook you are not precious about.
Not the leather one someone gave you. A cheap lined notebook you will actually write in badly. If the notebook is too nice you will save it for prayers worth writing neatly, and there is no such thing.
2. Draw one line down each page.
Left side wide, right side narrow. Left is what you asked. Right is what happened, and the date it happened. The right side stays empty for weeks at a time, and that is normal.
3. Write the date and one sentence.
One. Not a page. “Lord, I do not know what to do about Sunday.” That is a complete entry.
Psalm 62:8 — Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.
4. Be specific enough to recognize the answer.
“Bless my family” cannot be answered in a way you would notice. “Help me get through Thursday without saying the thing I always say” can.
Specific prayers are not smaller prayers. They are the ones you can look back on.
5. Go back and read it once a month.
Pick a date — the first Sunday, the last day of the month — and read the left-hand column. Fill in the right side where you can.
This is the step everyone skips, and it is the only one that changes anything.
What to write in a prayer journal when you have nothing to say
Some days you open it and there is nothing there. That is not a failure of faith.
Scripture assumes it.
Romans 8:26 — Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
Even scripture says you will not always know what to ask.
On those days, write one of these:
What I am dreading this week
What I am grateful for that I did not notice at the time
What I would ask for if I believed it could happen
Who needs something today that I could pray for instead of me
The same thing I wrote last week, again
One line of scripture, copied out, with nothing added
The last one is worth doing more than the others. Some verses worth writing out by hand are exactly the ones to copy, and one of them is a complete entry on a day when nothing else will come.
Prayer journal ideas for beginners
Keep it in one place, not with you. A journal you carry gets used in waiting rooms and then abandoned. A journal that lives on the kitchen table gets used at the kitchen table.
Write at the same time, not for the same length. Two minutes daily beats twenty minutes on Sunday. The habit is the time, not the amount.
Do not start over when you miss a week. Leave the gap. Write the new date under the old one. A journal with gaps in it is a real record of a real year.
Number your pages. When you go back looking for something you prayed about in spring, you will want to find it.
Leave the last page for answered prayers. One line each, moved over from the right-hand column. On the days it all feels pointless, that is the page to read.
How to pray when the journal does not help
Sometimes the notebook stays shut for a month, and picking it up feels like admitting something.
It is not. You did not fail at prayer. You had a hard month. And the verse people quote about praying has a second half that nobody quotes:
Luke 18:1 — And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint;
Always pray, and not to faint. Both halves. The second one assumes you will be tired.
If this is where you are, start with a prayer for the day you cannot pray, or read how to pray when you do not know what to say before you open the notebook again.
Where to start if you want it done for you
The hardest part of a prayer journal is the blank page. If you have started one three times and stopped three times, the problem was probably never your discipline. It was that nobody gave you the first line.
I made a 35-day guided journal that supplies it — one page a day, one prompt, one verse, and room to write. No blank pages to fill and no month to catch up on.
You do not have to become a completely different person to faithfully steward the life God has entrusted to you. You simply need to begin, right here, right now, with what is already in your hands.
I am not standing at the finish line looking back. I am on the trail with you.
One faithful step at a time,
Elizabeth Jane
