From My Heart to Yours
• Jul. 11, 2007 - Letterwriting: A Ministry to Touch Hearts
Dear Girls,
Oh, I wish I could talk to each of you heart to heart about the ministry of letter writing. But since I am talking with your mothers during this time I have decided to write you a letter! I hope this letter can serve as an object lesson for you as you consider the wonderful ministry God can give you to share the love of God with others as a vessel unto honor for His glory.
I want to begin by pointing you all to God's great love letter to us--the Bible! In it we read of His love to the children of Israel, to wayward sinners, His mercy to those who failed and forgot Him, to those He sought to bless, to those He desired to forgive. We see His acts and His wonderful promises. We see His heart for those He has made, His desire for fellowship with them, and His ways and truths for us. And in it all we see HIM!!!
Reading the letters others have written has dramatically changed my life. Many have been the times when I, due to taking my eyes off the Lord or physical exhaustion or back-to-back disappointments, I have gone into the dark valley only to be brought out by a letter of encouragement.
Other times sin has taken hold and a letter of rebuke or even a letter written by others to others and included in a tract or book has been used of God to bring me to repentance. Other times vision for a new area of growth or ministry or renewed strength or inspiration has come through reading letters. Of the tremendous potential of letter writing I agree with the Queen of Sheba: "The half has never been told." Even now the letters of the Bible and of the saints of old, or of military leaders, and notable Christians of old have played an inestimable role in developing my vision and life purpose. The legacy of the pen is of immeasurable worth, and it is a legacy fast fading, yet more needed than ever!
I recently heard on the radio recently of a man telling the story of a letter from the father he never knew. His father had died while serving overseas before this man had ever been born, and years after the father's death the letter was found in the attic of the son's childhood home. The years following his father's death had been very difficult, and his mother's life was so devastated that she never could really recover from the death and go on to healthy parenting. But this one letter dramatically affected him, and as he read how wanted and loved he was even before birth, this letter was mightily used of God in this man's life. He wept as he read it, and I wept as I listened. I thought of the letters I have longed to receive from some key people in my life and never have . . . of those letters I would love to see others I care about very much receive . . . and those I have thought of writing, but failed to write. Why did I fail to write them? Usually, it was due to a lack of discipline or preoccupation with the temporal instead of the eternal.
I regret not writing more letters to my own six children and have recommitted myself to do just that in the journals I am writing to each of them. For some letters that God prompted me to write, the opportunity has passed--it is too late. So, with all of these motivations in mind, I write to each of you young girls attending the Vessels unto Honor conference to try to impress upon you the importance of letter writing for the glory of God.
Until the season of my life of mothering many children I wrote hundreds of letters to others, and even now I hope to spend the last years of my life doing that once again.only now I hope to share that vision so that many of you will be joining me.
We see this wonderful means of God all throughout Scripture and through history as God worked in miraculous ways through letter writing. General Lee, from his tent, sent history-making directives and provided inspiration for his army's cause, garnering the respect of thousands in the process. Amy Carmichael, at her desk or from her bed of pain in "The room of peace," sent out hundreds of letters to her fellow workers to encourage them to see the One whom her own heart adored and to pattern all they did from that view. The Apostle Paul, William Tyndale, John Bunyan, and imprisoned Soviet pastors wrote from their prison cells with the concerns of their churches burning in their breasts. Susannah Spurgeon, at her desk as an invalid, wrote letters to raise money for ministerial student's libraries.
This could be you--dear younger sisters--sitting at your desks or under a tree or in your window seats with pen in hand and your Bible, hymn book, and perhaps a book of Christian poetry by Amy Carmichael, or a devotional by Charles Spurgeon, or a biography or even a collection of letters by another Christian . . . You could have beside you someone's work you can share with this--your--generation, that the blessing may go on. Letters--gifts of the heart--to be received and cherished. They are so greatly needed in these days to accomplish their mission to hearts everywhere.
Finally, I think of my own great yearnings--often almost unbearable at times, for a letter or even a note to know someone is thinking of me, or cares, or is praying, or has been helped my life--which I see as one failure after another descending on my shoulders with crushing weight. And then it comes . . .
Just as I am ready to sink, faint, and give in, and Satan is winning battle after battle . . . it comes: "Thank you for touching my life," or "I thank God for you," or I read one of Amy Carmichael's letters. And I always remember that line from a letter Elisabeth Elliot (to us iGranny Gren) once wrote that caused me to weep both in renewed hope and gratitude "I pray for you daily, Shelley."
Oh may we be to others, in word, what these past generations have been to so many. May we take up our pen and write for the glory of God, for the edification of the saints, for the salvation of souls, for the comfort of the brokenhearted, for the encouragement of the disheartened, for the return of the wayward, for the upward glance of the despairing one, for the inspiration of the disillusioned, for the strengthening of the weak, for the steadying of the faltering, for the correction of the erring one. Yea, to bless and help those whom God has placed in our lives.
May we all be vessels unto honor that the love and words and messages of God and His wonderful truths and words may flow through our hearts, to our minds, and through our pens to touch hearts that we may all say: "O magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt His name together" and "Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the Throne and unto the Lamb."
In Christ,
Shelley
What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of their heart; they have all the fire of our passions.--HELOISE |
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