Sincerity: Biblical Journaling

Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments. They follow a structure, and that structure is unusually good at holding grief: it gives you somewhere to put the complaint without demanding that you resolve it. Sincerity is that structure, on your phone. THE FOUR MOVEMENTS A guided composer walks you through the shape the psalmists used. Address — say who you are talking to. The psalms almost never open with the problem. They open with the name. Complaint — the unedited version. What is actually wrong, in the words you would use if nobody were listening. Request — ask for something specific. The lament psalms are startlingly blunt here, and the app does not soften it for you. Trust — most laments turn toward hope. Psalm 88 never does. If today is a Psalm 88, you can leave this one empty and the entry is still whole. You can stop anywhere in it. Everything you have written is kept. SOMETHING TO SIT WITH, EVERY DAY The app opens on a passage rather than an empty page — not a verse lifted out of context to encourage you, but a piece of an actual lament, with a note on what the psalmist is doing with it. Forty-two of them, one a day, weighted toward the hard ones. WHAT IS IN IT • A guided composer that autosaves as you write, so a phone call in the middle of a hard entry does not cost you the entry. • Solidarity with someone who has been there. Elijah under the broom tree, Hannah at Shiloh, Jeremiah in the cistern, Job on the ash heap — matched to what you actually wrote. • An ancient library on how grief was practised before it was pathologised: sackcloth, torn garments, the dirge, and the hardest psalms read on their own terms. • Your prayer reshaped into Hebrew poetic parallelism, the couplet form the psalms are built from. • Patterns over time — which postures recur, and where the centre of gravity has shifted. • Generated watercolour artwork for weekly patterns. YOUR JOURNAL IS KEPT SAFE A phone gets lost, dropped, stolen or replaced. Losing years of writing to any of that would be the worst thing this app could do to someone, so your entries are kept in your account and restored when you sign in somewhere new. • Sign in with Google, Microsoft, Apple, or an email address. • Entries are stored in your account and encrypted at rest. • They are readable by you and no other user. • Optional fingerprint or PIN lock over the app, for anyone who shares a device. • Nothing is sold, shared with advertisers, or used to train a model. • Export whenever you want — an encrypted file, or a plain PDF. Your writing is never trapped here. WHAT IT COSTS Writing is free, and stays free. The composer, the whole library, the daily passage, unlimited entries and encrypted export have no price — putting a paywall between someone and a prayer would be exactly the wrong thing to do. A subscription through your church covers the parts that cost money to run: the generated artwork and reflections. No advertising, ever. A NOTE ON WHAT THIS IS NOT Sincerity is a journal, not care. It is not a substitute for a doctor, a counsellor, or a pastor, and it does not diagnose or treat anything. If you are in danger, please contact your local emergency services — in the United States, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, by call or text. Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible, which its publishers have dedicated to the public domain.