
Young Jack Starting Diary
Jesus Gave Me His Spirit
I was converted during an evangelistic crusade in the summer before I started grade nine. The Holy Spirit made His home in my body and gave me gifts and abilities with which I could serve God. I soon discovered that I loved words, I loved reading, telling stories, and even writing stories. In the first year of Bible College, when I read Psalm 90:12: “Teach me to number my days that I may apply my heart unto wisdom.” I started keeping a rudimentary diary in a cheap scribbler. I was motivated to become a regular diarist of my actions and relationships.
When my siblings gave me a birthday present of a small, hardcover, lockable five-year diary book, I started using it immediately, copying the entries from the cheap scribbler I had been using. My new diary had room for only a few lines per day, but I used it, right through Bible School and the first years of marriage. Then I used a similar diary, a one-year version, with a whole page dedicated to each day.
More Encouragement to Write
The Spirit kept encouraging me to keep writing about my daily life. He even used truths spoken by pagan philosophers to help me. “The unexamined life is not worth living.” (Socrates) “He who does not remember the past is condemned to repeat it.” (Santayana)
When Jo and I had our first child, Valorie, God’s command struck home to me. “Do not forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart. Teach them to your children and to their children after them.” Deut. 4:9-10.
So, from 1959 to 2025, the Spirit’s gift of using words has resulted in sixty-six years of keeping up my daily diary. I wrote more regularly and recorded more incidents, pondering and reflecting on my thoughts, words, actions and habits. I wrote about the mistakes I made and what I learned from them. I noticed that during those years, my patterns of behaviour became clearer. As I thought and prayed about these patterns—these unconscious repetitions—God’s Spirit helped me to judge and decide whether I needed to continue them or make changes.
Many Other Ways of Using God’s Gift
God led me to use His gift of words in many roles. Pastoring a church for three years. Then He led Jo and me into a sixty-year word-based ministry with Wycliffe Bible Translators. For twenty-three years, He guided us to work with a Brazilian indigenous people group to translate a partial Bible into their hitherto unwritten language.
Many other speaking and writing roles followed, including leadership, public speaking at conferences, and writing weekly emailed reports on what God was doing in the world of Bible translation. That period was followed by following God’s leading to travel and speak at fundraising events, churches, schools and conferences, often one hundred events per year.
The next ministry God encouraged me to enter was writing and publishing nine books: five collections of previously written blog posts. Then followed four books of story-packed memoirs: the first covered the first twelve years of my life. The next three are backed by my diaries. The second described my teenage years. The third is packed with stories of Bible College, marriage and early ministry. The fourth describes the twenty-three years we worked with Brazil’s Canela people to translate God’s Word.
I’m grateful that God has given me a spiritual gift and shown me how to utilize it. My prayer for all my family and friends is that God will reveal what spiritual gift He has given each one of you and guide you to use it to bring glory to God.