Gospel Study Journal

Our Ward Conference was two Sunday's ago, and our new Stake President, Andy Horton, issued a challenge from the Stake Presidency -

Study the scriptures by topic with your family and record your insights and inspiration in a study journal.

Pres. Horton called it a "Learnal," and testified of how meaningful it is to study by topic. He invited us to study a person, a people or a prophet for the space of a month, and share our experience with the stake presidency, too. We're already planning to focus on the Savior because we're coming up on his ministry in 3rd Nephi. However, I've been thinking a lot about how to keep a better study journal, and I wasn't quite sure what to do.

While at Costco yesterday, I met the creator of this Gospel Study Journal. 

He and his wife had started studying the "Preach My Gospel" manual and went searching for a study journal to go along with it. There weren't any. All he could find were the blank, lined journals. So he and another man developed this journal to help with gospel study. 

It's divided into 5 sections that are easily identified from the outside edges...

• Journal Pages
• Continuation Writings (for when insights can't fit onto one page)
• Source Index (to note the sources for your information)
• Gratitude Section
• Personal Index (A list of gospel topics are already written along with blank lines for adding your own topics and short lines for writing page numbers. When you make an entry in your journal, you write the page number by the index topic.)

He said, "Suppose you were studying the atonement and made notes about it on page 12. You would write that page number in the index. Then in the future, when you're preparing a talk on the atonement, you can find exactly where you wrote your insights in your journal."

The journal creator said that missionaries all over the world are starting to use these journals as well. He personally has written four volumes of Book of Mormon study, and he noted that with each volume of study, his understanding and writing have deepened and grown more meaningful.

I hope to have the same experience. 

I really loved the layout of this journal, and feel like finding it was an answer from the Spirit and a nudge to follow the counsel of the stake presidency.