I Found A Letter I Could Not Read

You held his handwriting and could not read one line of it.

There were about forty of them in the box. Thin paper, folded small, some of them with the creases gone soft from being opened and refolded by somebody else a long time before you. His hand on every one. You could see where he had pressed harder and where the pen had run out and been shaken.

And you sat on the attic floor with one of them open on your knee for maybe ten minutes.

And then you folded it back along its own creases and put the box on the shelf.

That was a year ago last month.

Here is the thing you have not said to anybody, including your wife, who knows the box exists and has never asked about it.

It felt like being locked out of your own house. Not sad exactly. Something more specific than sad. There is a man in that box saying things to people he loved, and every one of those things is right there in front of you and entirely shut, and the shutting is not a metaphor, it is forty pieces of paper in a box on a shelf.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

That is a real loss and it is happening in the present tense, which is why it does not settle.

So I am not going to tell you it is wonderful that you have them. It is, and it does not touch the thing. And I am not going to suggest you have them translated by somebody, because you have already thought of that and there is a reason you have not done it, and the reason is that a stranger reading your grandfather's letters out loud to you is not what you want. You want to read them.

Let me show you something about writing things down.

Write the vision, and make it plain

There is an instruction in Habakkuk about putting something in writing, and the reason given for it is the useful part.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. (Habakkuk 2:2, King James Version)

That he may run that readeth it.

Now notice who the writing is for. Not the man writing it. Him, some other person, a reader who is not in the room and has not arrived yet, and who will be moving quickly when he does.

The whole purpose of putting it down is somebody who comes later.

You are the reader that writing was always aimed at, and words set down for somebody not yet in the room have never once been words meant to stay shut. Habakkuk 2:2 puts the whole reason for the writing in a future reader, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting with a man who has had a box on a shelf for a year.

Now stay on the phrase make it plain, because it is the part that reaches an attic floor.

Make it plain is an instruction about clarity for the sake of the one reading. The man writing is being told to consider somebody he will never meet, and to write in a way that person can get at.

Your grandfather did that. He wrote in the plainest thing he had, which was his own language, to people who had it.

You have letters written plainly by somebody doing exactly what he was supposed to do, and a plain thing has never once been shut on purpose. The Holy Spirit is the one who knows what is in those forty letters, and Habakkuk 2:2 makes the clarity a duty owed to a reader further down the road.

And here is the third thing, which is about the running.

That he may run. The reader in that verse is in motion. He is not sitting down with it for an afternoon. The writing is for somebody passing through, who needs it quickly, and the instruction assumes that reader arrives in the middle of his own life rather than at a convenient moment.

You have arrived at this in the middle of an ordinary life, and turning up late and busy has never once disqualified the reader a thing was written for. Habakkuk 2:2 assumes a reader in motion rather than one at leisure, and the Spirit of God is the one with a man who sat on an attic floor for ten minutes.

Forty letters is a finite thing

Here is the practical half, and it starts with a sum nobody has done yet.

Those letters use about six hundred different words. Probably fewer.

That is how letters work. A man writing home uses the same vocabulary over and over: the weather, the work, the people, the money, whether anybody is ill, when he is coming back. Forty letters from one man across a few years will be built out of a small and heavily repeated set.

Six hundred words at ten a day is two months.

You are two months from your own grandfather rather than a lifetime, and a finite pile of paper has never once required the whole of a language. The Spirit of God is the one with a man who has been treating forty letters as an entire tongue, and Habakkuk 2:2 aims the writing squarely at a reader who comes later.

Now here is the part that changes the order of the work.

Do not learn the language and then read the letters. Learn the letters.

Take one. One page. Copy out the words you do not know, which on the first page will be nearly all of them, and learn those ten first. Then do the same page again next week. Then the next page, which will share half its words with the first.

You are not learning a language in order to earn access to him. You are learning him, and the language arrives as a side effect, in exactly the order he happened to use it.

You have been going the long way round on purpose, and starting inside the thing you want has never once been a worse route than starting at a beginning. Habakkuk 2:2 has the writing made plain for the sake of the one who will read it, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man copying out ten words off a thin page.

And here is the thing about the year, said plainly and without any scolding.

The box went back on the shelf because it was too big. Forty letters in an unknown language is not a task, it is a wall, and nobody starts a wall.

One page is a task. And you have had ten days of work sitting on that shelf for a year, disguised as something enormous.

You are the one who sets the size of this, and one page has never once been the same object as forty. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a man back up into an attic with a pencil, and the written word makes the whole reason for writing a reader who was not there at the time.

One word, and say it to somebody living

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves and the second one matters most.

Learn one word your family would have used and say it to somebody in the family.

The first half is the letter. Go up, take one out, and find one word in it. Not the letter. One word, off one page, in his handwriting.

You have one word waiting in that box and ten days of work disguised as a wall, and one page has never once been the same size as forty. Habakkuk 2:2 puts the writing there for the reader who turns up later, and the Holy Spirit is the one in an attic with a man and a pencil.

And here is the second half, which keeps this from becoming a private project in an attic.

Say that word to somebody alive. Your mother, an aunt, whoever is left who knew him. Say it out loud and tell them it was in one of his letters.

Because there are two things in that box: a language and a man. The language you can get on your own with ten words a day. The man you cannot, and the people who knew him are the only ones who can tell you why he used that particular word, and they will not be here forever. Then stop, because one word is the assignment and nobody owes anybody a translation today.

You have permission to take one word up out of that box and stop, and one word said out loud to somebody who knew him has never once been a small errand. The Spirit of God is the one in the room when a word out of a dead man's letter is said to somebody who remembers him, and Habakkuk 2:2 aims the whole of it at a reader running through.