The Letter

I like to write.

I especially like blue ink.  Thick, flowing ink that slightly squishes on the page.

I write in journals and notebooks, diaries and blogs.

I muse and mull and ponder and think . . . sometimes poems escape from the tip of my pen.

I write on train rides and planes in the sky . . . I write on post-its and napkins and tiny scraps of paper when I can't find anything else.

I write to people.  Mostly by keyboard.  Maybe I even write to you.

Writing is the way I process my thoughts . . . and make discoveries.

Our very lives are written letters . . . storied lives.

We are marked with stories -- covered like a sleeve tattoo . . . engraved with eternal pen and ink . . . marked with the cross of Christ.

When others look at us . . . 

          they should stop and stare.

                     (like you stare at tattooed eyebrows)

We are marked.

With a mark of death . . . 

          . . . a mark of new life.

Known and read by everybody.

But you are our letter . . . you are like a letter written by Christ . . . you are not written with pen and ink or on tablets of stone.  You are written in our hearts by the Spirit of the living God.  -- 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 Contemporary English Version 

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of 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 3:2-3 NRSV

You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. -- 2 Corinthians 3:2 NIV

Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you.  Christ himself wrote it -- not with ink, but with God's living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives.  -- 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 The Message