TMT010 - Oh Life, how can I record you?

Listen to Episode 10 of The Matt Trick in the player above or download it.

Oliver and Camilla pulling a Matt Trick

Oliver assisting in T-Shirt design

The Matt Trick

OhLife.com is a great way to get an email every day, or every week, or whenever you want to remind you to write in your journal. To create a journal entry, simply reply to the email. Super simple and convenient. No more excuses for not doing it! You can even attach pictures. Totally free, and totally awesome.

The Five Minute Journal provides some excellent prompts for what to fill your OhLife journal with. Or you can pony up and buy a nice looking hard cover journal from them too, I guess.

Goal Line

I've set OhLife to send me an email every day this week. I want to respond to it and create a journal entry every day this week. I'll probably bring it back down to once every week (which I've been doing for the past few years) but this one week, I'll try every day. I'll write using the prompts in the Five Minute Journal, or the prompt I reference in the Matt-spirational Moment below.

Matt-spiration Moment

Right now, up at Thunder Mountain near Provo, UT, my extended family is all together at the Bert N. Whitney Annual Family Reunion. These reunions have been happening longer than I have been alive and they've been regularly up at Thunder Mountain for about twenty years now. One thing my Aunts have helped us keep at high priority is Family History. And much of that family history comes from personal journals and accounts of our ancestors. And when I say ancestors, it's not just people from 20 generations back boarding the Mayflower or something far removed that I might have trouble relating to, but stories from my parents' and grandparents' lives. I'm grateful to have these stories and this history from my family to enjoy and reread and share with my children throughout my life.

One such story that my kids have enjoyed hearing is about an outing that my grandpa, Bert Whitney, took his five older children on one June in 1960. My grandma, Ann Whitney who was pregnant, stayed home with the baby and toddler. The outing was to Red Rock Canyon to climb a mountain and catch a glimpse of "Hidden Lake." This being the Mojave Desert in Southern Nevada, seeing water must have been a special treat for the family. During the hike, my dad, age 9, and his brother Clark, age 7, went on ahead of the pack. Even with careful warnings and instructions from my Grandpa, the boys didn't find the right spot, so they started climb back down. But the descent was steep and the sandstone was slippery. My dad stepped on a rock ledge that crumbled and broke, and as he tumbled down the side of the mountain, he yelled, "This is the end of meeeee."

Everything turned out alright in the end and my dad was helicoptered away to get his broken leg patched up. My poor grandma was left in the dark wondering where her family was, since even though my grandpa asked the sheriff to contact her, somehow the task was overlooked, but she eventually learned about the incident on the evening news. But my dad came out okay. His picture appeared in the paper and he was even the centerpiece of a parade with his cast later that summer.

So what if there was no record of this? The only thing I knew about this story before I read about it in one of the books my Aunts put together is that my dad would jokingly talk about “the time I fell off the cliff.”

Henry B. Eyering, an apostle in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, tells of a habit he acquired when his children were young. One time his father rendered a significant service to his young family, though he easily could have left it undone, or even at least had it delegated to someone else. In Elder Eyering’s own words:

“...thinking of what he was doing for us, and just as I got to the door, I heard in my mind—not in my own voice—these words: 'I’m not giving you these experiences for yourself. Write them down.'  

Continuing on he says,

“I wrote down a few lines every day for years. I never missed a day no matter how tired I was or how early I would have to start the next day. Before I would write, I would ponder this question: ‘Have I seen the hand of God reaching out to touch us or our children or our family today?’ As I kept at it, something began to happen. As I would cast my mind over the day, I would see evidence of what God had done for one of us that I had not recognized in the busy moments of the day. As that happened, and it happened often, I realized that trying to remember had allowed God to show me what He had done.”

He taught that as he continued in this habit of journal writing, he grew an attitude of gratitude and was ever able to see God blessing his family and that their prayers were always heard and answered. As his children grew, he continued writing without missing a day. And to show from it, he was able to publish a copy of the journal for each of his children who, now as adults, will surprise him by saying things like, “Dad, I was reading the journal and remember that time…”

The experiences we have in this life are meant to test us, teach us, and help us grow. But the experiences are not just for us. By writing them down in a habit of daily journaling, we are creating a record that can be cherished by our families, perhaps even for generations to come.

Most of us spend plenty of time writing down silly things on Facebook for our “friends” to see like, “LOL, feel fat after eating bacon samwhich, #omnomnom”. Doesn’t it make more sense to record things of a little bit more significance in a medium slightly more enduring? And as you take time to reflect and write, thinking along the lines of prompts such as, “How has the hand of God touched my life today?” or any of the other prompts in the Five Minute Journal, you’ll feel a deeper sense of gratitude and love for life. That life will be better and more richly lived, and your family will benefit from your experiences as well.