I remember as a girl waiting on the porch for the postman.  He carried a leather bag strapped across his body and walked through my neighborhood delivering handfuls of missives.  Almost every day a letter came from my grandmother or aunt or cousin.  And I can still see my father pulling out sheets of plain white paper from his desk drawer in the evenings.  He might write five or six letters in one sitting--and not just a line or two.  He created letters two and three pages long.  The envelopes sat stacked up in the entry way to be clipped to the mailbox with a wooden clothespin the next morning, ready to go out with the jolly mailman. 

And in college there was nothing more exhilarating than twirling the combination lock on the post office box, pulling open that enclosure to discover a letter from Giovanni, the stamps from Italy pastel green or pink or lavender, exotic.  The letters felt alive in my hands, breathing love, a feast for my heart.  I still have those letters.  My mother saved them for me.  And every now and then I go back to that ancient bundle, still a banquet, the ink indelible, memorable.

When Giovanni and I were in Italy a few months ago enjoying our little home in the countryside, both of us fell horribly sick, too weak to go anywhere.  And that's when I pulled out all the letters my husband had archived over the years of living apart, before Skype and texts.  We did have email.  But we did not abandon letter writing.  The letters documented the everyday, the quotidian.  We recorded the weather, the seasons, the intensity of daily work.   Those letters chronicled, too, our desire to be together, to conquer the ocean between us, the hope that one day we'd live together and forge a life without the distance.  Those letters acted as a shelter that we could return to again and again when the distance seemed too great to transcend.  No wonder we keep letters.

This week while reading the Scriptures, I found this collection of verses from one of Paul's letters to the Corinthians:  Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you.  Christ himself wrote it--not with ink, but with God's living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives...Only God can write such a letter...it's written with spirit on spirit, his life on our lives."  (From II Corinthians 3, The Message).

Something about this passage brought back that exhilaration of discovering a letter in the brass enclosure at the post office.  We like letters, because God likes letters.  He enjoys writing words. Letters and words are in our spiritual DNA.  To think that one's life is a letter, handwritten by God's very spirit, His narrative chiseled into our very hearts.  And I think that God must come back to us again and again, to read the letters He's written, to savor His words, to savor us.