One day along a hot and dusty road in Zimbabwe there appeared before me a group of barefoot, smiling children, white teeth flashing in contrast to dark skin. One said, simply, "My name is Loveletter." This was my first encounter with an honest-to-goodness, living, breathing, walking, talking "Loveletter." I'd never realized I was getting so many love letters until I actually met one. And yet, now I saw that, for years, I'd been receiving and ignoring dozens of these missives, allowing them to remain like a pile of unopened mail on the desk of my life.
At the time, I was not fully prepared to receive such an epistle, and so I wasn't fully open to the imaginative and creative possibilities it contained. But since that initial encounter, the idea has slowly dawned on me that when we acquaint ourselves more intimately with the true author of our lives, Love, we discover we are engaged in the grand correspondence of Love—as "Love's correspondents." We are participants with Love, that force which creates and preserves community, restores the individual within the community, and brings the disconnected aspects of our various lives into a harmonious whole. Each of us is bound to Love and bound together in Love.
When the lessons of Love are loved and lived, I see how each of us is renamed as "love letter" or "Love's letter," as sacred, beautiful, precious in His sight. As such, our communications and our relationships become holy opportunities. Each of us is a letter of Love, written by the divine hand, to be freely given, freely received, and treated with the same care and tenderness with which we are composed. To be read with gratitude and cherished as a divine message such that, as Paul put it, "the loving-kindness of God, spreading from heart to heart, may cause yet more hearts to overflow with thanksgiving to his glory." II Cor 4:15 (Twentieth Century New Testament).
