Over the Christmas season my brothers and sisters and their families got together. My brother brought over a box of memorabilia he had gathered from Mom & Dad’s old house. Included in the box was a stack of old letters my grandmother (who died in 1956) wrote to my Dad when he was away in the US Navy during World War 2. This stack of hand-written letters was a treasure-trove of family history information. She tried to keep him up to speed on everything back home from his “kittie”, to his cousin, Ralph Diehl, serving in India, to the 1944 death of her brother-in-law, Charley Aldrich.

Among her lamentations in those letters, written from 1943-1945, was her request to receive a letter from him. “Why don’t you write?” she asked often. In one 1944 letter, she noted that it had been three months since she had heard from her son, in spite of the fact that she sent a letter to him every Monday that he was gone.

Perhaps that question remains for us today. In spite of God’s efforts to reach out to you and I daily, how often do we respond to Him? Perhaps you, like my father, have gotten wrapped up in important business, and just forgot. But He sends us regular reminders. Maybe God is speaking to your heart right now: “Why don’t you…”.

Of Samuel’s parents, it is recorded, “And they rose up in the morning early, and worshipped before the Lord, and returned, and came to their house to Ramah” (1 Samuel 1:19).

Tags: fellowship, relationship, World War II