Missives

As fast as I could send them, they came back to me.

Every day, nearly, there’s a letter in the mailbox. I thought I was the only one doing something old, something with scripted words that flow from a pen and hand cramps and premeditated thought rather than a screen with keys and clicking and a backspace option. “I’ll write letters,” I decided when the churches closed. “I’ll be the encourager.”

I wrote letters but quickly learned I wasn’t alone in the pen and ink and folded papers. I wasn’t the only one sealing envelopes and pressing little squares of passage into the upper righthand corners. I wasn’t the only one sitting at a dining room table, shaking out words of absence and fondness and “how I long to see you in person.”

We can’t leave our homes, but our words can.

I was surprised when the first letter came. One week into an open-ended silence, and the note in the box was warm in my hands like a window pane when the sun shines through. It’s not the same as standing outside, enveloped in the actual warmth of the sun and squinting at its brightness. It’s not the same. But opening the letter is standing next to the glass, close enough to feel the slice of warmth that radiates through, wishing it was the real thing.

More and more the missives pile up, and the ache in my heart is soothed by paper and ink. I think of Paul’s epistles and how he expressed his longing for the believers on the other end of the letters.

“I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. This sign is of genuineness in every letter of mine; it is the way I write.” (2 Thess. 3:17)
“It is right for me to feel this way about you all, because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace.” (Phil. 1:7-8)
“…my brothers, whom I love and long for” (Phil. 4:1)

Paul’s earnestness comes through in printed words. Those phrases never resonated much with me until the virus came and shuttered our physical fellowship. We moved inside, away from one another and the warmth of face-to-face presence. Then the letters started coming, and with every inky sentence, I know that even this isolation won’t sever the closeness Christ has given us. He binds us.

The church doors remain closed, and I miss my family like the heat of the sun in the midst of a long winter. But in winter you can still stand next to a window, feel the warmth of the sun on the glass, and know you’ll step outside one day, squinting, sure of its presence.

 

We can’t leave our homes, but our words can. Share on X

 

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash