Who was Ralph Josselin? A short answer is that he was a very ordinary man. He was a pastor of a small village church in Essex, England, in the seventeenth century, but nothing about him is especially out of the ordinary. He performed his pastoral duties faithfully, worried often about finances, and paid attention to news from beyond the borders of his personal world—his times were those radical decades of the English Civil War, Republic, and the monarchy’s Restoration, not to mention many goings-on in continental Europe.

There are two reasons why his name is known at all today, even if only by very few people. The first is that he wrote a diary, and that diary has survived to the present (available in the Kindle edition HERE). The second reason is that his diary is a useful source for illuminating part of the recent biography of the somewhat better-known figure of John Owen.

For a time, both of these men as young men were pastors in neighbouring rural parishes. Incidentally, they were both born in 1616, and both died in August of 1683. Both men were committed to the spiritual growth and care of their parishes and conferred with each other in their pastoral vocations. But while Owen moved on from parish ministry to pursue a career both stellar and tragic, moving among the movers and shakers of England’s turbulent times, Josselin remained in rural Essex, far from the action and confined to a parochial profession.

The entries of Josselin’s diary reveal events mundane and often repetitive. He went about his business of daily life, domestic, pastoral and agricultural. On occasion something interesting appears—at one time he went hunting, and on another was stung by a bee on the nose. Elsewhere he mentioned a man who was apparently possessed by a demon. He appears preoccupied with monetary matters, recording the changing costs of goods, money he owed or was owed, money he earned. He noted bitter winters, wet summers, failed harvests, price inflation, disease outbreaks. He lost at least three of his children and buried more than one friend. He could have been any one of us. Yet, his was a life which he lived consciously before the Lord—aiming to keep the Bible as his Counsellor and seeking God to direct him.

Apart from being a window through which we may peer into the seventeenth century, Ralph Josselin’s diary is not all that interesting. His times were extraordinary, but his life was very ordinary.

When I read this, several years ago, it reminded me of the importance of living one’s life before the Lord, of serving him faithfully, and being content with that. Few of us become world-class theologians or ecclesiastical statesmen like John Owen, or political dynamos shaping wars and revolutions and reformations as many of his friends were. Few of us are even challenged with challenging times were as these men were, facing the “Great Ejection” of 1662 when some two thousand ministers were evicted from their churches. Most of us are more like Ralph Josselin.

Josselin’s life, compared with Owen’s, reminded me of the Lord’s word to Baruch in Jeremiah 45. In the midst of God’s bigger plans, Baruch is told: “Do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold I am bringing disaster upon all flesh… but I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.” God has given us our lives. Let us be satisfied with this and aim to live faithfully before him. Do the work he has given us to do without grumbling or complaint. Hold fast and hold forth the word of life he has also entrusted to us. Ultimately, that is all we can do, and it is all that he has asked of us.

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