Old Letters

For my birthday this year I was given an unusually thick greeting card envelope.  Inside the standard birthday card my mother had placed another card.  It was an old Christmas card first given to me by a family friend when I was just a baby.  Inside the card was a very short note he penned all those years ago.  For the first time in the years since his death, all I wanted to do was hear his voice and trademark laugh.  A letter written so long ago preserved with such care for the sake of a boy yet to grow into a man.

What if God wasn’t interested with science when he inspired, wrote, and preserved Genesis?  Instead, what if he was crafting a loving letter for his children to read and reread when the decay and broken-ness of this groaning world made hope a difficult currency to accumulate?  What if he was more interested in speaking blessing into the long years of suffering his people would have to endure than he was about leaving “clues” to help us justify a certain age of earth?  What if he was writing a tender note of encouragement to his beloved as they attempted to face death?

There is great merit and importance in scholarship, theological pontification, and healthy debates inside the academic world.  Such fields of study have given believers a rich heritage of knowledge and even wisdom.  But thinking about the possible age of the earth doesn’t warm my soul or move me closer to understanding the One Person who I most desire to hear from.  And I honestly think he knew that as he used human authors, editors, and church councils to write, preserve, and bind together these many documents for the love of us who he eternally knew would need to hear him make sense of all the chaos and pain.

When I write letters for my two year old daughter to read when she is older, I write with a hope of blessing her with my memories.  I want those letters to give her strength and courage as she walks through a world that seems to push against more than help her along.  I’m not interested in enlightening her to the mechanics of the budgeting software I use to ensure we save enough for her college.  She needs me to teach her how to view and use money, but these letters I write forward to her are aimed at something far deeper.

The Bible is full of true history, facts, numbers, and laws.  But through these, God wants us to hear his larger story of hope culminating in Jesus becoming for us what we could not be for ourselves and winning for us what we could not win for ourselves.  Can you hear him writing: “Dear child, let me tell you about when our relationship began long before you came along.  Let me tell you the story about how I created you because I wanted you.  Let me tell you how I wouldn’t let you get in the way of me loving you.”