Love Letters

When Cheri and I were dating, there was no such thing as email, IM, text messages, Twitter or Facebook.  I’ve mentioned before that we didn’t have a typical college dating experience.  While we were at school, we usually had to say goodnight after I walked Cheri back to her dorm after dinner.  We weren’t allowed to enter each other’s dorms, nor were we allowed to call each other in our dorm rooms.  But there was an intricate letter delivery system in place that allowed us to write letters to each other, and they would be delivered from dorm to dorm every night shortly before time for our nightly prayer group meetings.  I would write a letter to Cheri every night, and would wait with anticipation for the letters to be delivered to our dorm so I could read what she had written to me. 

I loved getting her letters.  She would tell me how much she enjoyed being with me, how her evening went, and how much she couldn’t wait to see me again the next day.  She would start every letter with “My Dearest Sweetheart” or “My Darling Joel”, and she had a certain way that she would write my name on the envelope.  I would read her letter several times before I went to bed, hanging on every word.  From time to time, one of us would miss the cutoff time to drop a letter in the box.  It was agonizing to not get a letter.  It meant that we would have to wait until we could see each other the next day to communicate with each other. 

I thought of this as I read II Corinthians 3:3.  It says “And you show that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”   I’m very mindful of this as I’m preparing to go to Guatemala on a short-term mission trip.  But this is something we need to be mindful of everyday.  If the Spirit lives within us, we should strive to show ourselves to others as a letter from Christ, a testimony of what a relationship with Jesus can be.