Shortly after having her first child, a woman is diagnosed with a brain tumour. She doesn’t know what the future holds so she starts writing a letter to her son every day. As the seriousness of the cancer becomes clearer, she becomes more desperate to tell her child, the things she wants to tell him but that he is too young to understand. So she spends more time writing the letters. She tells the story of her life. She tells of her likes, her hopes, her fears. She writes to tell her son how much she loves him and that she would do anything for him.

As the cancer progresses it begins to effect her mind and especially her language. She begins to have trouble speaking, trouble understanding what other people are saying and trouble writing the letters. Finally she has surgery to remove the tumour. She survives, recovers, and she lives a long life. But she never speaks again. She can look after herself and generally do tasks she is shown but she can’t communicate with language.

As her son grows up. She gives him lots of hugs. She makes him lots of meals. She plays with him. As he gets older, other family members read his mother’s letters to him. And eventually he is old enough to read them himself, sitting on her lap at first, then by her side. They smile together, they cry together, they laugh together, and they follow their dreams together.

How callous to say this is not a real personal relationship! And yet it has become commonplace to say that if God is not speaking directly and immediately to a person, then it is not a real personal relationship.

Photo Credit: “letters”, © 2006 liz west, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio