The Gift of Words

February 8, 2021

The Gift of Words

I will remember the deeds of the LORD;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
~Psalm 77:11          

I still haven’t figured out how to do Valentine’s Day. Thoughts of candlelight dinners, heart-shaped boxes, and romantic cards make me feel like I’m the one left standing in a game of musical chairs after the music stops: awkward and alone. I know I’m not alone-alone, but there are days I feel like it. Valentine’s Day is one of them.

Scripture compels me to remember God’s love and faithfulness and that He will never leave me. King David’s antidote for his downcast spirit was to remember God and praise Him for the days of old and the wonders He had done.

Remembering helps me too.

Ray and I wrote almost daily letters to one another during a year-long, long-distance dating relationship and engagement. We both saved them. I stored them together in a box after we got married and shoved it to the back of various closet shelves whenever we moved. I knew I would someday read them again. And I did. Ten months after Ray died.

One Saturday night I slid the tattered box from its shelf. Lowering it to the floor beside my chair I sat down, gently removed a letter, slipped it from its envelope, and began to read. Welcoming the return of lost memories, I read one letter after another. Love and longing flowed through the decades into the wee hours of Sunday morning until Ray’s words found their home in my heart.

By the time I had finished reading three hundred and twenty-two letters shortly before noon on Monday, something had changed. What began as a stirring in my heart had swelled into a seismic shift from upside down to right side up. Although longing had awakened grief, making a holy mess of sorrow, I also felt the healing power of words.

Ray didn’t journal or keep a diary. After he died, I searched for words, things he’d written on scraps of paper: directions, a phone message, bank balance, or grocery list. I hoped they would satisfy a hunger I couldn’t yet name.

As a new widow I asked God to help me believe He would be enough—enough on messy days and at night when I’m undone by Ray’s empty side of our bed. I asked God to be enough as I grew old alone. I wanted more than to know about God’s love. I wanted to experience the awe, the belonging, and foreverness of it. I wanted to feel satisfied and fulfilled. I wanted to be whole.

When I read our letters, my heart had heard Ray read his to me. Not as a mature sixty-five-year-old, but as a passionate young man growing into adulthood, fearful he wouldn’t be a good-enough husband or father, desperately wanting the approval of his father and mine—a young man with unwavering faith and wild love for his bride-to-be. But there was more.

Beneath the echoes of Ray’s words, I felt another voice—One that held his words and breathed life into them on their journey to my heart. God began to answer my widow’s prayer when He used the gift of Ray’s words to infuse my heart with His love for me—an experience that changed the trajectory of just about everything.

Remembering inspires hope for my journey . . . especially on the tough days.