Letter

I was driving down the road the other day talking to my little brother about preparing to go on a mission. I found myself starting sentences with: 'when I went on my mission'...

I'm getting old. Age is just a number, right? At least that's what I tell myself.

Here are a couple of examples of some of those sentences:

'When I was on my mission we still used film cameras and had to get the film developed...now they have digital cameras.' Isn't that crazy? It makes me appreciate the camera I have now that much more.

or,

'When I was on my mission we had to hand-write all of our letters. It would usually take two weeks for the letter to get home and another two weeks to get a response. By the time the month had past any concerns from the original letter had already been resolved.'

While it would have been nice to have a nicer camera on my mission, I'm actually grateful that we still had to hand-write our letters. My family was nice enough to keep them all. To this day, the hand-written letters that I have received are among my most prized possessions. There is something about how personal they can be...they are more RAW and consequently more real. There is no delete key. Every word, every sentence has to be thought out before writing it.

I received one such letter on my birthday. In tiny blue ink in the lower left hand corner of the page is a quote from Henry David Thoreau:

"The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this?"

I have been abundantLY blessed by friendship. Because of it, I am a different person...a better one. Perhaps the greatest measure of friendship is the size of the void that is left in its absence...like the depth of a footprint and its indelible impression (impossible to be removed). Here's to you, CHEERS!