My Love Letters To God

You show that you are letter from Christ...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 3:3}

Many times when I’m overwhelmed, it’s hard to know what to say to God or how to even begin.  I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about things and sometimes, when I can’t think things through, I get quiet inside.  Knotted up, I would push through my day and just get things done.  So, a few years ago after reading the Bible I decided to write a letter to God and ever since my intimacy with the Lord has grown and I began my own personal scrapbook journal.  I now address Him in my journal as “Dear Abba Father.”

Something intense happens when I write a letter to God, before I know it, I’m writing him a letter and I can’t stop the words from flowing. My mind has so much to say, but my writing can’t catch up to my thoughts, it’s amazing! My emotions poured forth, spilling over from my heart’s reservoir of love. Somehow the very act of writing—my thoughts on paper— releases an outpouring of feelings before unexpressed.

Yet, this experience really should have come as no surprise. After all, God is our supreme Lover, our great Romancer. He knew that a wonderful way to woo His beloved and express His emotions was through a love letter, the Bible. He knew that “letters mingle souls,” and He gave us His heart-print in ink so that we would have the joy of reading, pondering, and tracing its testimony over and over again. Because the spoken word is temporary, God blessed us with a lasting testament of His passion.

    

Every time, I read the bible, I cherished the love letters I receive, and I wait with excitement to receive them. I would read and reread them. I would sprinkle them with perfume, cut it and paste it in my journal. I enjoy them because they make me feel loved. — because someone thought enough of me to write to me, because someone took the time and effort to reveal his inmost, passionate thoughts, because someone trusted me with the greatest gift of all, his heart.

It is the gift of my whole heart that God most desires—a heart without pretense or vanity; a heart in all its honesty, beauty, passion, and brokenness; a heart beating with love, joy, sadness, delight, doubt, pain and even anger. True love expresses all emotions, and true love—God’s true love for me. The most beautiful way I have found in which to wrap the gift of my heart is within a letter. Love letters are “our heart on our sleeve, our battle standard, our essence, our un-erasable signature, our emotional fingerprint, our private well of memory…our true secret self.”

It is our hidden self we most long to reveal. My love letters reveal my truest essence—my soul made visible in all its intimacy and complications. I cannot help but love God because He loves me; I cannot help but write to God because He has written to me. I take the time to write because my Lover is worthy of my efforts. I write because, though physically unseen, God is real, and writing draws me closer to Him. I write because I desire to offer Him more than a hurried “I love You” on the run. I write because I long to embroider my passion with a flourish of my pen, an embellishment of my heart. I write because my spoken sentiments are passing, and I desire a permanent way to preserve my thoughts. I write because God values my prayers so much that He says He sprinkles them with incense and saves them in the “golden bowls of heaven.”

Conclusion: My ups, my downs, my victories, my defeats, my adoration, my apathy, my faith, my doubts, my questions—and God’s responses—are recorded in my journals. These entries are love letters from my heart to God’s—messages from His heart to mine—letters sent special delivery to and from heaven that have changed my life on earth. I sign my letters in ink that will one day fade. But God signs His in permanent ink—the blood of His Son shed for me, blood that covers my imperfection and allows me to pray openly to Him.

Whitney Houston - Jesus Loves Me .

Written by Maribel Castillo

August 2, 2013