You’ve Got Mail
When my husband and I first fell in love, we were a continent and an ocean apart. We had once been good friends living in the same small town, but life took us in separate directions. When we finally re-connected, he was climbing the corporate ladder in Birmingham, England, and I was managing life as a single mom in Portland, Oregon. But despite the 4,287 miles between us, our connection and friendship grew. After just a few months of e-mailing, one day—on opposite sides of the globe—we both woke up utterly in love with the other. It happened this way, despite the insurmountable distance between us, because of the incredible power of adoring, endearing and affectionate words…i.e., love letters. If we lived in a different era, these words would have been shared entirely in handwritten letters. But our correspondence, in this age of Google, took place by e-mail. I still consider our e-mail messages “love letters” because they were no less romantic than letters sent by post. Like this little one that landed in my inbox at 1 a.m. on June 28, 2008:
Subject: hi
The entire world is glowing because of you.
I just finished driving 3 hours and almost every moment
was spent thinking about what the future will be like with you.
I wrote in my journal during that time, “I am sustained by the most wonderful e-mails. Thank you, Gmail. I love you, Gmail.” Looking back on things, sustained is probably not the right word; flooded would be more like it: From May 2008 until September of that same year we exchanged more than 1,500 e-mails. If you break that down, we hit “send” 500 times a month, 125 times per week, 17.5 times per day. For four months straight, practically every hour we spent awake and without one another, a love note was written. Pretty incredible, huh? When we said we fell in love, we weren’t kidding. We were crazy about each other. It is no wonder that that season remains one of the most treasured times in my entire life. I woke up every morning feeling like it was Christmas, every e-mail being a new and sparkling gift. E-mails like this one:
Subject: Yup
still thinking about you.
even now.
and now too.
still doing it.
Love letters, even those just 12 words long like the one above, are life-giving. Have you ever received a love letter from someone you adored? Didn’t it just make you feel amazing? Receiving a love letter brings a rush; opening love letters opens the heart; reading love letters awakens our spirit. Stasi Eldredge, co-author of Captivating: Unveiling the Mystery of a Woman’s Soul, recalls and reflects on the time she received love letters from her husband, John:
“John wrote me letters, lots of letters. Each one filled with his love for God and his passion for me, his desire for me…I came out to my car after my waitressing shift ended to find his poetry underneath my windshield. Verses written for me, to me! He loved me. He saw and knew me and pursued me. I loved being romanced…at some core place…every woman wants to be seen, wanted and pursued. We want to be romanced.”
Love letters tell us we are someone who is seen, longed for and adored. Love letters tell us we are someone who is worth being romanced. How can the heart not spill over with the joy of being known, recognized and pursued? It’s what our feminine heart really longs for, isn’t it?
Love letters have so much more power than just the power to lift our mood. When we receive the words contained in a love letter as truth, we are changed. Each time I opened and read an e-mail love letter from that adoring man in England (my now husband), I got an opportunity to see myself in a new way. The reality of my life began to shift because of his words. No longer did I feel myself to be a just a tired and struggling single mom; I was now a woman who was special to someone. Wow! Me? Worthy of being pursued? Wanted!? Desired!? Beautiful!? I would read and reread each e-mail several times to let this new possibility of who I was sink in. It was a magical time of new beginnings as I let myself be transformed by someone else’s words. Through the words of each love letter I came to know myself as a woman who is adored, desired, worthy, loved and longed for. If our hearts can be transformed by man-made love letters, how much more so might they be transformed by God-made ones?
Somehow the power of love became present and real in my life in part because of those love letters. In a poetic and mysterious way, flesh became word via passionate typing. To me, this is proof that the miracle of love can take place over continents and oceans and perhaps even galaxies…
Since giving my life to Christ I have come to experience an even greater mystery and miracle of love. The beautiful mystery is this: Word became flesh. God’s Word became man. In Jesus, God gave us a living, breathing love letter. Jesus is God’s personal love letter to us. And as is true for all love letters, what is expressed is the author’s ardent desire to be known and to be drawn near to.
Do you know yourself as someone who is worth being romanced? Someone who, right now, is being pursued? I pray you do. And I pray you let the loving and affectionate words of those who adore you sink in. Let yourself be moved to joy by love letters of all kinds. Most important, let your heart be transformed by God’s personal love letter to you. We are all meant to know ourselves as significant, secure, accepted and beloved. How about this February we pick up and read the Gospel as if it was a love letter? How about we read it and receive what it says about us as Truth? That’s a challenge I’m up for. Just as I used to allow my husband’s love letters to me to shift my identity, this month I will be drawing near to God’s love letter and praying it transforms my heart. “For,” as my favorite line in Captivating tells us, “the root of all holiness is Romance.” And what, really, is more romantic than a love letter?
