Journaling for My Spiritual Development During Deployments

During deployments—where days are long, nights are quiet, and everything in between feels compressed—I learned that the heaviest things we carry are often the ones no one sees. Gear can be weighed, packed, and accounted for. But the internal load—the decisions made under pressure, the moments that hit harder than expected, the quiet fears you don’t name out loud—those stay with you long after the mission ends. Days moved fast, sometimes too fast, and I often found myself lying in my rack at night realizing I hadn’t had a single moment to process what I had lived through.

Journaling became one of the few places where the pace finally slowed down for me.

At first, it wasn’t anything profound. Just a few lines scribbled at the end of a long day. But over time, writing became a kind of spiritual breathing room, an oasis sometimes. It gave me a place to lay down what I couldn’t say to anyone else—not because I didn’t trust my team, but because some things needed to be sorted out quietly, between me and God.

I discovered that writing wasn’t separate from prayer. For me, it became prayer. There were nights when the only prayer I could manage was a single sentence on a page: “Lord, I don’t know what to do with this.” Other nights, the words came out in fragments—half-formed thoughts, questions, memories, things I didn’t even realize were weighing on me until they appeared in ink. Journaling helped untangle thoughts that stayed knotted in my mind and gave shape to feelings I didn’t always know how to name.

These days, in my spiritual exercises and Ignatian practices of discernment, I can see how those early habits were retraining my spiritual muscles. Ignatian prayer often begins with noticing—where God showed up, where strength came from, where something inside you tightened or softened. Journaling became my way of noticing. It helped me look back on the day with honesty instead of judgment. It helped me see the moments of grace I would have missed: a sergeant’s joke that cut through the tension, a quiet sunrise over the flightline before the day kicked off, a sense of calm that settled over me in the middle of roaring fighter jets when I needed it most.

In uniform, journaling felt like an interior after-action review. Not the kind with checklists or metrics, but the kind that helps you understand yourself. Writing helped me recognize patterns—when fatigue was shaping my reactions, when stress was building, when I was carrying more than I realized. It helped me name the weight of decisions that lingered long after the mission ended. And it helped me see that God was present even in the moments I had rushed through or forgotten.

Over time, those pages became a record of God’s quiet work in my life. Looking back, I can see things I couldn’t see in the moment: how I was being strengthened, stretched, protected, and guided. Journaling didn’t make the hard days easier, but it helped me carry them with more clarity and less isolation.

The blank pages you keep—whether in a notebook, a journal, or the margins of a prayer book—can become a kind of spiritual shelter. I used them to write down prayers, Scripture verses, names of people I prayed for, or reflections at the end of a shift or mission. I didn’t have to write beautifully. I just had to show up with a pen, honesty, and vulnerability.

For me, journaling ensured that service didn’t harden my heart. Service can toughen you, but it can also harden you if you’re not careful. Journaling helped me find my interior self again, allowing me to integrate everything—faith, conscience, fear, hope—into something whole. One honest page at a time, it became a way to stay grounded, connected, and spiritually alive in a place where it was easy to feel stretched thin.

And even now, long after military life and those deployments, journaling remains one of the most important ways I stay attentive to God’s presence in my life. As a writer, I find great joy in not just being able to delve deep into my own thoughts, but also in being able to share God's wonders with my readers.