The Letters in the Shoebox

There are nineteen of them in a shoebox and they are all sealed and none of them are addressed to anybody who can read yet in the sense he means.

He started it four years ago on a night when he could not sleep, which is how most of these things start. The first one was to his daughter and was about a specific afternoon at a specific beach when she was three and did something that he wanted somebody to have a record of.

He writes about four a year. Some are to her and some are to his son and two of them are to both. He has told his wife, who thinks it is lovely and does not entirely understand it, which is fair because he does not either.

He is forty-one and the house is rented and the work has moved them twice and will move them again. There is nothing here that stays.

And what got him started, if he is honest, was the arithmetic that a man does at two in the morning at forty: that in twenty years his children will have a version of him assembled from photographs and other people's memories, and that the version will be approximately nobody, and that a shoebox is not much of an answer to that but it is the only one he has.

Anybody writing something nobody will read for years knows this. And I want to say now: nobody in this article is going to be handed a legacy project, and nobody is going to be told that a person who leaves nothing visible has wasted a life. Neither is true and the second one is a cruelty.

The children of thy servants shall continue

Let me put down a line and notice how far out it looks and what it is standing on.

The children of thy servants shall continue, and their seed shall be established before thee.Psalm 102:28

Continue and established, and both of them applied to people the writer of that psalm will never meet. Their seed, meaning a generation after the generation after him.

And look at where that psalm has been. Almost the whole of Psalm 102 is one of the darkest complaints in the book. Bones burned as a hearth. Days consumed like smoke. A man describing himself as a sparrow alone on a housetop. That is the psalm this sentence is the last line of.

Which means the establishing of a generation he cannot see is what a man says at the end of a psalm where nothing at all has been resolved for himself.

You are able to speak about a generation being established while nothing in your own situation is settled. That is not a nice thought handed to a man at a kitchen table at eleven at night. It is what is written in Psalm 102, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a house he does not expect to keep. The address is temporary. The continuing is God's and it runs past the writer.

And notice the two words before it: before thee. The establishing happens in front of God rather than in front of anybody who could confirm it, which is exactly the position of a man sealing an envelope nobody will open for two decades.

You have something being established in front of God rather than in front of witnesses. Psalm 102:28 is where that stands, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an old and unresolved psalm land in a man with a shoebox and a lamp.

Nobody is going to make it a project

Now the part this category exists for.

There is no assignment here. He is not going to be told to write more of them, or to organize them, or to build a system for the shoebox, and if anything I would ask him not to, because the moment it becomes a project it becomes a thing he is behind on.

And nobody who leaves nothing visible has wasted a life. That includes the man who never wrote a letter. It includes his own father, who by his account said very little and is not the subject of this article and does not need defending.

What I want to say about the shoebox is this, and I think it is the thing he has not been able to articulate to his wife.

The letters are not a substitute for being known. They are an act of faith about a future he will not be present for, and the psalm calls that establishing rather than sentiment.

One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.Psalm 145:4

Declared to another generation. Told forward. Not stored, told.

You were built to hand something forward, and Scripture describes it as declaring rather than as preserving. Psalm 145:4 is where that is written, and it is the Spirit of God who lets a man see what he has been doing at eleven at night for four years.

You are establishing something right now, in a rented kitchen, in front of God rather than in front of anybody who could tell you it worked. It is written that the children of His servants shall continue and their seed shall be established before Him, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in a man with nineteen sealed envelopes.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly about the two in the mornings at forty. The arithmetic that starts a shoebox is often carrying more than it looks like, and being told your seed is established has never been a reason to sit with it alone.