Snail-mail: We have all heard the term. This concept of the mail being a subpar way of communication certainly came about during the growth of the readily available telephone, internet, email, file sharing, Facebooking, Dropboxing, and finally text messaging. We have discovered that we don't have to wait to hear back from our friends, furthermore we don't even have to risk the rejection of reaching out by just watching what is happening in one another's lives (via Facebook and Twitter and blogs like this one). You wouldn't even have to call me and ask me how my life is, if I put all of my information about my marriage, my church, my walk with God, what kind of music I'm listening to and what kind of vacation I would like to take. I'm not excusing myself from being a person who loves to gather information about you through these means, but I have noticed that sometimes I feel like this excuses me from being personally connected to you through means other than through the screen I'm typing this from.
Mail is an astounding thing, isn't it? We write a letter, put a 40something cent stamp on it, and off it goes to our friends or family. BUT there is risk involved in sending a letter-- what if we pour our hearts out on to the pages in our shaky hand and the response we get is all about the very surface things we can see on Facebook? What if the recipient doesn't want to write a letter back? I for one realize that I will avoid contact sometimes because I'm unsure of how the interchange will play out. I know this is not healthy. NO I won't allow this fear to keep me from my relationships. Therefore, I have cause to believe that I must try and combat this. But in thinking through this, I realize that there is much more to writing a letter we can learn from it.
Snail-mail is slow, hence the name. It requires patience. Let's look into this patience and how much we can gain from simply sitting down and penning a letter to a friend.
Writing by hand takes care and thought.
You see it in classrooms across the country, pens and paper are being replaced by tape recorders, keyboards, iPads and other forms of technology that make things quicker and supposedly better. Yes, it is much quicker to type out the words that we are listening too, and for some of us (myself included) much much easier to read and organize. When you write in pen you have to be sure what you're writing you mean, or else you could have to start over again. We can learn patience and care for the weight of our words through hand writing letters. How many times have you written something on twitter and Facebook that you simply wish you hadn't said, or in a text message for that matter? Realized that the person (political leader, friend, or acquaintance) you had just spend 140 characters berating or judging was just as sinful and broken as you were and really needed to seek forgiveness. But forgiveness is hard when your words have been seen by your friends and family, also when the words have now been etched in the internet (I have a clue for you, even if you delete your post, the words are still out there somewhere). I haven't written this to condemn words on social networks, but simply to say, maybe a bit of person to person handwriting will help us remember that we are indeed speaking to people and that our words carry tremendous weight. See James 3:3-12 where the author speaks of our tongues being capable of great influence, both for good and bad. He compares the tongue to a spark that can set an entire forest ablaze. Therefore, we must remember how powerful words are and mean what we say. I think that taking time to write our words we can learn to tame them to be better used for encouraging one another. This is reason number one why I want to begin pen-pal relationships with friends.
Using Snail-mail requires time and social energy to buy stamps.
So now that we're writing these letters, we need to make sure that we have enough postage to get them across the country to our peeps! There is a certain huge lesson we can learn from buying stamps. Going to the post office requires a huge amount of patience. You've been there before thinking: "OK I just need to make sure I have the right postage for this birthday card, and for this other small package. This shouldn't take too long right?" We are in a world now where waiting isn't something we're used to. So when we're at Starbucks or the post office, or Disney World we become kind of frustrated waiting in line. With our smartphone society we have become very good at killing time: Angry Birds, YouTube, Words With Friends, and Social Networking have become our new version of conversation. We still complain when we have to wait in line even though we have the distractions we do. I want to urge myself to not pull out my iPhone whenever I am in line, I want to be able to observe the world we have around us, including the people who are in line or working at the particular establishment. It's really hard to know how you can care for someone else if you're busy distracting yourself from your surroundings. For all I know the person next to us could be someone we know (I'm guilty of this at the Gym especially), they could also be someone who is just crying for some interaction--I can't reach out to them if I'm in my "don't-bother-me-I'm-playing-candy-crush" mode! So if we spend the time to wait in the line, and actually wait we will be shown many things. We could be encouraged by the conversations we overhear, we can also hear other conversations that would bring us to prayer for someone who is hurting.
Abram got a change of name out of waiting (on God), and under his new name Abraham he was granted the Blessing of God to his family--which later became the nation of Israel. To be fair, Abraham had struggled (like we often do) with this concept of waiting.
Additionally the folks at the post office are doing their best and if we get agitated by the timeliness of their service (to us, mind you) we might become a bad customer and make their job harder for them to do with a smile on their face. Patience can allow us to get to the counter to buy stamps and offer them the best of us, instead of the worst. A word about the kiosks: you cant get really cool stamps like the Jimi Hendrix stamps I saw my bro with the other day. Lets think about it this way, we are relational beings: if we avoid relating to people we can cause damage to our nature, you never know having a little conversation with the post officer could make your day and you could impact their day for the better. This is the biggest reason why I would love to write letters to you, friends and family.
Why wait?
The answer lies in our hearts. You know you love to read letters from people, the handwriting tells you how they're doing, the wrinkles on the page tell you that they had spent some time writing this, the scratched out words show that they cared to make the sentences proper. You had no clue they were going to send you a letter, but it was such a blessing when you got it. Lets pick up a pen and make an effort to enjoy waiting, share what is happening in your life--more than what is on your favorite social network. My generation is becoming known as the "I want it now" generation, this is problematic to me, because we also have such great ideas of how we wish the world could be shaped. But we have to learn to wait on the Lord and others so that we can remember that our opinions count just as much as others'.
No comments:
Post a Comment