Faithbooking

The past couple weeks we have started a new ongoing project - faithbooking. A faithbook is basically a scrapbook centered on your faith. We have expanded it to include family history, and things about us so that we can pass these books on to our children and grandchildren - and great grandchildren!

We've been using a faithbooking kit called "This is My Story" as our base and working off of it. The kit comes with a book and pre-made, fill-in-the-blank pages, but we are just using the workbook and creating our own pages. We're only 2 weeks into it. Each Friday we plan a set of pages in our "draft book" - just a marble notebook where we can jot down our ideas before creating the actual page. Then the rest of the week we turn those draft pages into the real thing.

It's a lot of fun; this week was very... um... interesting as we had to do a few seemingly random things. Things like:

• If you were a type of fruit, what would you be and why?
• If you were a room in a house, which would you be and why?
• If you were a musical instrument, what would you be and why?

It was rather weird to have to come up with answers to these - it took me forever to think of what fruit I'd be and eventually I gave up and did a flower instead. :-) What kind of fruit would you be? Or room or flower or instrument? Why? :-) (I was thinking, why do we need to write this down? But just think how funny it will be for my great grandchildren to read it...)

But then of course there's the meaningful things too, like favorite childhood memories, people who have influenced my life, writing a letter about myself to the next generation, and things about me like the meaning of my name, etc. Those are the kinds of things we are doing now, though I'm sure down the road we will be making pages about what we believe and why.

Scrapbooking is a lot of fun, though I am a hopeless perfectionist. My mom and sister have finished three pages in the space of time it takes me to make one. :-)

I would encourage you to create your own faithbook in some form. It doesn't necessarily have to be a scrapbook, though I think the scrapbook idea is the most fun (you can put pictures and everything in it and make it look nice); it could be a journal, or my mom had the idea for the scrapbook-phobic people to just do the draft book - even if you don't make the actual pages, at least write it down! Future generations will thank you. Oh - and do it in your own handwriting. You may have beautiful neat writing or horrible sloppy writing - but either way it will be much more meaningful to have everything in your own hand instead of some nice - but impersonal - computer font.