I have been reading old letters off and on all day from my family.  Back when postage was a nickel.  We wrote letters in the fifty and sixties.  Hundreds of them.  All addressed by hand.  In Palmer penmanship.  (Which I heard the schools are going to quit teaching!!)  I have been sorting them for my children (who probably won't even want them) and discarding many of them and remembering a million incidents of our lives.  My mother wrote every week and my dad added a line.

And I finally started reading Ken's letters from Spain and Cuba from 1964-65.  He was gone for three and four months at a time.  They are full of the difficulties of being a squadron commander and not having enough gasoline to give his pilots the time in the air that they needed.  I doubt that I had any idea at all how much stress he was under.  I was twenty-six years old.  He was thirty-five.  I was just a kid.  He was a grown man.  Our lives were so different.   But somewhere in it all, we met in the middle and it was wonderful.  I would do it all over again, but life isn't like that.  We get to do it once.

This generation won't have letters.  There is something about touching paper, unfolding it, hearing it crackle that email doesn't give you.  A hand written letter is so very personal.  You can't just hit a key and broadcast it to the world.  It's yours alone.  You can fold it up and put it back in the envelope and take it out fifty years later and be transported.  You are young again.  Starting out.  Raising children.

I have only started on his letters, there are a lot of them.  I want to read them all  again.  I want to hear him say, "I love you, I am lonely, I can't wait to come home," all over again.

Paul, the apostle wrote like that.  His letters to his friends who were Christians are full of yearning to see them again.  He had a "Thorn in the flesh" as he put it,  that kept him from writing everything himself.  He probably had a scribe.  But he ended his letters by saying, "I will write these closing words in my own handwriting.  See how large I have to make the letters!"  Galations 6:11  And in Colossians 4:16 "By the way, after you have read this letter will you pass it on to the church in Laodicea?  And read the letter I wrote to them."  And here we are two thousand years later, pulling those letters out and reading them for ourselves.  It is a joy.