Acts 8 - Burned Love Letters

My Swedish grandmother was born in 1893, the eighth of eleven children raised in a two room cottage. When the children finished sixth grade, they had to find a job/apprenticeship since there wasn't enough room for all of them! Grandma considered herself fortunate that her parents let her stay home a couple more years to attend cooking school.

At the age of 19, she moved to the United States to work as a domestic. She had left her childhood sweetheart back home but after five years, returned to Sweden to marry him. She and my grandfather had two girls before emigrating to Chicago in 1922. Following that, a third girl was born and lastly a boy--my father.

For years, she held onto the love letters sent back and forth during those five years that she had worked alone in Chicago. After my grandpa died, she shared an apartment with one of my aunts. At the time, apartment buildings had an incinerator in the basement. The outside landing of each apartment had a little hatch door to drop burnable garbage into the incinerator. That's where she disposed of her precious love letters.

Grandma was a very quiet, retiring person. Perhaps she felt the letters were just too personal to let anyone else read them. A few times I've wished the letters were still around--at least the less intimate ones. They were a piece of family history with insight into life as a temporary immigrant with loved ones "back home."  However, I know about six words in Swedish. I'd stumble through an online-translator to read them, even if they had not been burned.

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The New Testament tells the story of an Ethiopian official, treasurer to Candace, the queen. He was a god-fearing man who who had traveled to Jerusalem to worship. He was educated enough to be able to read Hebrew. Yet he couldn't make sense of the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah. God sent a man named Philip who helped him understand that the prophecies. They were about salvation through Jesus Christ (Acts 8). That's why the Bible is sometimes called God's love letter to us.

There are many people who can read the Bible, but it remains as cloudy and vague as if it were in a different language. For all practical purposes, the pages are burned beyond recognition.

Father in heaven, thank you for giving us Your living word. Open our minds to understand the Bible, to accept the truth of the forgiveness and love you offer. Make us aware of people around us who need to have those some truths explained to them so that they, too, can believe in Jesus--in whose name we pray. Amen.

PS - The mock-up "burned letter" is using an envelope that was actually sent from a young man (Sigurd "Sigge" Altin) to one of my aunts in 1944. He was an on-again/off-again correspondent. She saved a valentine from him, but nothing came of their relationship. She married someone else--when she was 70! Our family name originally was Karlsson, then Carlsson, then finally Carlson.