The Letter I Wrote to God
Timothy, I thank God for you—the God I serve with a clear conscience, just as my ancestors did. Night and day I constantly remember you in my prayers. — 2 Timothy 1:3 (NLT)
Yesterday was World Letter Writing Day. When I was young, long before texting was a thing, back when connecting took more than reaching for a phone, I used to write my wife letters. She was my girlfriend then, and every summer her family would disappear on vacation for the better part of a month. So, we wrote. Pages and pages about the small events of the day and how much we missed each other. I thought it was a little silly at the time, a little mushy. But she kept every one of mine. She still has them as quiet reminders of a love we were only beginning to learn.
These days I have taken to writing again, though about something different. I write about the sermons I hear. It helps me hold on to what I have learned, reminds me of God’s faithfulness, and works like a compass through the week. So, maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me when, this week, I ended up writing a letter to God.
I needed it more than I realized. My mind was scattered that day. The room was quiet, but I wasn’t. A lot was going on, and even in the stillness I could not seem to land anywhere near Him. Then I started writing. I wrote about how thankful I was for His protection over my family, how He had provided again and again. And somewhere in the writing, the focus I had been chasing simply arrived. I found myself thinking about the things He has done in the world, reminding myself that He can do what I cannot. I prayed for my family by name. All fourteen of them, from my wife down to the youngest grandchild, and by the end I was thanking Him for thinking of me as worth His attention, even on a day I felt like I was not.
What surprised me is that this is not a new problem, and it is not a modern one. Long before our phones learned to interrupt us every few minutes, Jesus kept stepping away from the noise on purpose. “But Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer” (Luke 5:16). Not once, and not only in a crisis. Often. The Son of God built solitude into His life, which tells me the pull toward distraction is old, and the answer to it is older still.
Paul reached for a different tool near the end of his life. He wrote. His last letter to Timothy does not read like a lecture; it reads like a man remembering out loud in the presence of God: he thanks God for Timothy and tells him that night and day he constantly holds him in his prayers. His praying and his writing had become one motion: Gratitude set down on a page; one name held before God at a time. That is nearly what happened at my desk this week, and I hadn’t planned it that way.
I do not think God is impressed by the method. Jesus withdrew to a quiet place; Paul picked up a pen. What they shared was not a technique but an intention. The decision to turn, on purpose, toward the One who is always turned toward us. My trouble is rarely that God has gone quiet. It is that I have filled every gap where I might have heard Him. The letter didn’t summon Him. It just cleared enough room for me to notice He was already there.
We live in a world built to keep us from ever being still. The notifications are relentless, and the quiet has started to feel optional. So, it matters more than it used to that we choose the things that pull us back toward Him; a set-aside minute to pray, a page to write, a walk taken on purpose without the phone in hand. However you do it, the point is the same: making a little room, again and again, for the connection that makes everything else more whole.
What has been crowding out the quiet where you might otherwise hear God? What small, deliberate practice — a written page, a spoken prayer, a walk without the phone — could you make room for this week?
A PRAYER
My prayer is we are grateful for God staying near even when our minds are everywhere but with Him. In a world that never stops talking, teach us to step away like Jesus did and to pour out our hearts like Paul did: honestly, gratefully, one name at a time. Clear enough room in us to notice You were here all along. We are listening, and we are grateful. Amen.