I had a wonderful conversation Friday night with Juan Moncayo, Peter Bugbee, Cameron Knox, and a new seminary student named Ricardo who flew in six days ago from Bogota, Colombia. He’s living in an empty Cornerstone apartment this semester and plans to start classes in the spring. For three hours we talked about all kinds of things, and all eternal. I was refreshed and challenged, and I gained a lot of wisdom. I am surrounded by some amazing people.
The Lord gave me the grace to fight off meditional laziness and actually journal about what we talked about, too, and I recorded four single-spaced MS Word pages in an hour and twenty minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever journaled that much at once, at least not that I can remember. This shows how much benefit there is in spiritual conversation with other believers. I used to think that most of my spiritual growth came as a result of being alone and thinking. I certainly still value solitude, but I am continually realizing how much I have to gain from others around me, and how much my thinking is stimulated by the thoughts and words of others as they live and communicate the truth. The ideas and lessons that I journaled about Friday night (as a result of our conversation) are precious thoughts to me.
Tonight I finally stopped being stupid and short-sighted, too: I took one minute and burned my electronic journal onto a CD (120 single-spaced pages with .6-inch margins). It starts with my wedding vows on December 19, 2002, and runs through my thoughts from tonight about biblical preaching. I really need to print it off and get it bound, but this is second-best. I didn’t have it backed up anywhere, and have been risking losing it for a few years now. In fact, God was very kind a year ago when He caused me to take my laptop in to get it looked at because it was acting strange. The computer guys told me that my hard drive was almost completely fried. Had I waited much longer, they wouldn’t have been able to recover any of my files. As it was, they were able to transfer everything over to a new hard drive. Since I have a genuinely ridiculous amount of file folders and MS Word documents, I was very thankful that the Lord preserved them.
Oftentimes it is in the little things that grace is most impressive.
davidagundersen.com 
Gunner,
I enjoyed this post. And I hear you loud and clear about how good conversation with brothers in Christ can really stimulate thinking and provide much wisdom. One of Jonathan Edwards’instructions to Christians in their pursuit of ‘Christian Knowledge’ was to ‘Improve conversation with others to this end. How much might persons promote each other’s in divine things, if they would improve conversation as they might…’
It is also fun to hear about your journals. I love journals and I love to hear about other people’s journals: how they keep them; what they write in them; how much they have written, etc.
Good stuff, Gunner–
DBrown