A LETTER a Day

The title above is strangely appropriate to the forum in which this post finds itself, stuck right in the middle of the Blogging from A to Z April Challenge in which we bloggers post daily on our pages on a subject beginning with successive letters of the alphabet; a letter a day, except for Sunday, the day of most-welcome rest. Equally surprising is the fact that it was this challenge which led me to another that has similarly intrigued me, that of writing a snail mail letter a day.

 Jenny is a fellow A-to-Z-er whose The Modest Peacock blog (www.themodestpeacock.blogspot.com) celebrates handwritten missives in a big way. Her site led me to the story of Randy Osborne (www.randyosborne.com), who has taken on the daunting task of writing a letter a day in the year 2013 to anybody who wants one. Should I survive this year’s A to Z Challenge, I’ve mentally signed on to undertaking the A Month of Letters challenge in February of next year, writing letters that stamps are affixed to instead of posted on a webpage.

I am a huge fan of snail mail. Long before I owned a computer I wrote personal letters in abundance, usually to family and friends, but occasionally to church members who needed encouragement, authors I admired, or anyone else who caught my interest for a brief moment of time and had an address I could write on an envelope. As life got busier and the electronic world made communication easier I largely gave up the practice, as it simply took up too much time.

Perhaps it was when my sons moved away from home that my interest in the subject returned. I simply missed chatting with them, and doing so by mail allowed me to satisfy that urge in greater volume than I can text with my thumbs, one-sided conversations they could read and respond to whenever they had the time.

I come by the letter-writing bug honestly, as both my parents took pen in hand on a regular basis. My mother largely communicated with people at Christmas, handwriting long letters in the cards she sent to distant friends. My dad, however, wrote weekly letters to his children who had moved away from home. Just the sight of his familiar handwriting in my mailbox was as comforting as the words I read inside that detailed his day-to-day life or his thoughts on some subject I’d mentioned to him recently. Upon his death years ago I gathered up those treasures of his that I still had on hand and put them into a notebook. How wonderful it was when my now-grown youngest son started asking questions about the grandfather he never knew that I could pull out that volume and share written insights with him into the mind and heart of this wonderful man. He told me later that the letters my dad had written me were evidence of  how much he loved me.

We each have such a volume of letters filled with wisdom and instruction from a Father who loves us, penned in the pages of our Bibles. If we would only realize it as such we would look at it differently, open its pages as eagerly in the mornings as we rip open an envelope we find addressed to us in our mailbox and read what’s inside…simply a letter a day.

“For the Father Himself [tenderly] loves you…”
(John 16:27 AMP)