Living Letters

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts. (2 Corinthians 3:2,3)

I love cursive writing.
It is beautiful and unique. No two samples of handwriting are the same. I remember that I could not wait to be in the third grade. That was the year I would learn cursive. No more printing block letters that never flowed across the page in a fluid movement. I would write elegantly. I even hoped that I could have an old fashioned fountain pen to make the new experience complete. I did receive one of those pens as a gift. I brought it to school…where it leaked in my pencil case…all over my desk. I was told to never bring it to school again.

I used to practice my imaginary cursive by making continuous loops within the lines of the  loose leaf paper. I thought my loops looked like one of those collapsible tunnels that toddlers crawl through. I could imagine putting my pen right through the tunnel from one end to the other. I practiced and practiced getting my tunnels just right. I couldn’t wait until the swirly tunnels became real letters.

Before emails were the method of communication, people wrote letters. There is something very precious about the art of letter writing. The writer takes the time to compose the letter, make it neat and legible, put forth the extra effort to mail the letter, and wait patiently for a response.

We are living letters. God uses our lives to write, not on paper, but on human hearts. That is a wonderfully, daunting task. The cursive of our lives is unique by God’s design. No two letters are the same. We are known and read by everybody often without even realizing that our letters become our public testimony to our Lord.

My daughter is a second grade teacher…a Christian teacher in a public school. Often, when parents come into her classroom to help with a project or to meet for conferences, they tell her there is something different about your classroom. The testimony of her living letter is the fact that the Holy Spirit dwells within her and is present in her classroom. Without even speaking a word, she is testifying Christ in the uniqueness of her letter…through the power of the Spirit.

The children in her class are not just bodies to teach, they are souls to pray for…there is an eternal purpose. No ink needed here.

We have neighbors who need to read excerpts of the letter of our lives. We come in contact with people for brief moments each day, who may only read the first few sentences of our letter, but what they read leaves an impression…all to God’s glory.

Since Christ is the Author of our letter, and the Spirit does the writing, we are simply the swirly tunnels that His love flows through from end to end, person to person.

Where will our living letter be delivered today?
What hurting heart needs to read its life giving message?
What message will they find there?