Journaling to God With My New Mac App

I confess…I eagerly awaited the launch of the new Mac Ap store.  I constantly google “best mac aps” and get into these modes where I am downloading and trying out new stuff.

Since the new Mac Ap store opened on January 6, I have downloaded and tried six apps.  That only averages one per day – not too fanatical.

So far there is one I want to share about.  It is called Memoires.  It is a journaling ap.  If you read my blog at all regularly you will see many references to journaling.  You may think the only thing I learned from my Masters in Community Counseling is that journaling can be very cathartic.

But, actually, I journaled way before I became a counselor.  I journal about everything.  It is pretty much a free flowing stream, but includes prayers, concerns, thanks, ideas, book reviews, thoughts on current topics, sermons, blogs, etc.  I do budgets and life change lists.  It is pretty all encompassing.

I learned years ago to just keep one journal.  Having a separate journal for different topics became confusing because I never seemed to have the right journal with me when I needed it.  And it killed me to write a business idea in my prayer journal, or to pray for advice in my gratitude journal, etc.

So it has always been one journal to our One God!

There are still limitations though.

I like to go back and check off answered prayers.

I like to review how I am doing on my spending fast.

I want to remember what I was going through when my parents were sick.

In the past, I had to just grab a journal from the pile and start thumbing through pages.  Many old journals have a bunch of sticky notes on them where I found certain passages I wanted to refer to.

Now I have Memoires.  Coincidentally in Memoires you can have many different journals online, but I still have the same problem keeping the correct one open, so within a day I consolidated back to one.

The Reasons I Like It

The wonderful thing about Memoires is the search function.  I can search by date, by keywords, by topic, by name and it will search the entire body of journal posts and provide a list.

After a couple of days I became better at naming the day’s journal with headlines I may want to look back on.  However, on the first or second day I made a list of all of the tax documents I needed to collect for my accountant.

Within minutes the post was highlighted!

Then I just printed it out and used it like a checklist.

This is perfect for me because I use a lot of my journal notes to expand into blog posts.  I also pray for clients and can search over time by name.  In my profession, confidentiality is a must.  Memoires has a lock feature to keep posts confidential.  In written journals I had to use initials or made up names.

And an extra feature for the creative types is that you can use their whiteboard drawing tool to add symbols or drawings and insert directly into your journal.  I love that because it makes the journal more visibly appealing.

It helps me overcome the fact that I am typing, not writing, in my journal.  It feels like it loses some of the “art” by doing it on the computer.  The drawing tool and the ability to add photos helps with that.

I am only 6 days into it, so I will keep you posted on whether or not it becomes my new journaling home.  If you have a chance to try it out, let us know your thoughts.  Or if you have a preferred journaling tool, we would love to hear about it!