It used to be that I checked my mailbox religiously every day.
But now, I admit, I sometimes go days without even thinking of the mail.
With email and even my bills being sent electronically, there just doesn’t seem much of reason to walk down the stairs and across the parking lot to pop open a mailbox that will probably be empty.
So the other night I was pleasantly surprised when I checked my mail and found two surprises: a gift from my mom and a letter from a friend.
I can’t even tell you the last time I received a handwritten letter from someone, but this letter in particular meant a lot to me knowing the care and thought that had gone into it. I hope that friend knows how special she is to me.
The gift from my mom was also special. This past Christmas she had sent me a beautiful rosary and even as I thanked her for it, I also made mention that there existed an Anglican version of the prayer beads. My mom immediately went to work trying to locate one for me.
With online shopping like amazon.com, locating an Anglican rosary should have been an easy task, but my mom took a different route.
My mom doesn’t have a lot of money and she can’t just slap down a credit card so, instead she found this woman online who makes Anglican rosaries and called her up.
She explained to the woman my story and the woman offered to make an Anglican rosary (to my mom’s specifications) and send it to my mom. If my mom liked it, she could send the woman a check, otherwise no worries.
A few weeks later, the rosary arrived and my mom sent it on to me.
The rosary the woman made was beautiful. I started to cry as I held it. My mom had chosen picture jasper for the beads. Each bead crisscrossed with tiny lines seemed to represent worlds in a universe I had yet to explore. The cross my mom had chosen was the Canterbury cross.
I cried not because I was moved by its beauty, but because I was touched, profoundly touched, by the efforts my mom had put into getting it for me.
One thing I have learned since joining Hope, since becoming an Episcopalian, since deciding to explore this calling to the priesthood is that it’s not the journey itself that is so important, it’s the people who travel with us on the journey.
In Ruth 1:16-17, Ruth tells Naomi, “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die and there I will be buried.”
The level of commitment Ruth makes to Naomi is astounding and I think reflective of the relationships God wishes us to have with each other.
We are all on the journey together. We leave jobs. We retire. We move away. We leave churches. We move on, but every one of us impacts every other one of us on this journey and our commitment to each other can never waiver even if we go months or years or lifetimes without seeing each other.
It’s the people. It’s human connection.
It is one reason to check the mailbox every day.
