Dear One,
Your growth and your gift of hospitality were exhibited beautifully during my stay with you. Every detail was attended to, then given freely, in abundance and love, to all who came in and out of your home that entire week.
What a precious friend you have always been. My memory takes me back to your high school years. You were so young and fragile yet always seeking, searching, and longing to find God. Now here you are in midlife, at the crossroads of your time, still struggling, still fragile, and still longing, yet through grace, slowly being transformed.
I feel quite blessed to have come to a place of knowing that letting go and suffering pain leads to a deepening of one’s inner life and a deepening of the intimacy with the Source of all life. All pain brings us to deeper places of trust and faith. Thank you for your sufferings with me. I am in a deep place of resting now, a place of unspeakable value in this unrelenting aging process.
Far exceeding all of this, however, is the depth of love we have shared for one another over many years. I am unspeakably grateful for such a precious gift. My prayer for you is that you will, in your own way and in your own time, continue to persevere in your seeking and your searching for God and that amid this longing, you will indeed come to know Whose and who you are.
If I may take as my own the words of the Apostle Paul to his young friend, Timothy, “As for me, my life is already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time for my departure is near. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.1 Might your life, too, affirm these truths.
I love you, my precious friend, and encourage you to do your inner work so that you, too, might have the experiential knowledge of resting in God and be given the gift to meet people as they are, where they are, in love.
Gazing at the Starlight,
Betty