There is nothing quite like going to the mailbox and getting a letter addressed to you in handwriting.  I have literally hundreds of letters that were addressed to me.  I saved them all.  Many of them with five cent postage stamps.  But I've been cleaning out drawers and boxes since  I have been spending so much time at home,  and deciding which of these letters to keep is next on my list.

I am going through them one by one, rereading each one.  And if there is something about one of my children in them, I put it in a manila envelope for them to deal with.  The rest of them I am throwing out. (Except the ones from Ken.  From Spain, Cuba, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, orVietnam. I will read all of those some other day.  (He was gone a lot. )

There are emotions involved with throwing away my mother and father's handwriting.  I feel like I am throwing them away.  But there's nothing on the pages except something about the weather, or where they were going, or who they saw at church.  Just a few words to keep in touch before we could afford a phone call.  But still.   They hold so many memories.

Hebrews was a personal handwritten letter to people that the writer loved.  Think how much time it took for him to write it with a goose quill and ink.  After naming dozens of people who lived by faith, the writer reminds us how many of them died horrible deaths and still stood firm in their faith.  They believed that the Messiah would come.  And he did.  They just didn't live to see it.  We did.

The writer sums up what our faith should look like in Heb. 12: 1,  "Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which does so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us."

My parents are in that cloud of witnesses for me.