but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

—Romans 5:8 (ESV)

Part 1 of this post is back on the blog I’m about to mention.

While setting up this website, I discovered an old blog that I had on this account. It was a blog that my really close friend Melissa and I set up after we graduated high school as a birthday present for me.

When we started the blog, we had known each other for the seven years of middle and high school. After we graduated from high school, she moved to Boston to attend Harvard for undergrad, and I stayed in NC to attend UNC. We were really close, and I think at the time I was really afraid of losing our friendship to distance, and the blog was born.

We agreed to write to each other to keep in touch on the blog. According to my initial post on the blog, the idea was that “for Jasmin’s birthday, MEEEEE, we are writing a letter a week alternating about our lives and the people we meet and the things we do” and include at least one photo that we took “or if it’s really amazing, can come from somewhere else. NO, just photos that we take.” (we would go to break these rules many times). I would write my letters in green, and Melissa in pink/black.

It’s been six years since we posted on the blog at “regular” intervals. Discovering it was such a treasure, though. It offered me a look into how things have changed over the years, and boy, have things changed. Even though we were sending was filtered, mentally processed word vomit, you can still see the little insecurities we had, whether it was about academic performance, relationships, and the like. We wrote about our daily happenings and our thoughts on various topics. “I feel like I’m getting more and more confused about love and marriage as concepts.” and “Is he not human like the rest of us?” and “I also found out how truly loved and cared for I was.”

One particular letter I wrote caught my eye. It was titled, “Letters Unsent,” and it was a hastily-written cyber letter explaining that I had written a (physical) letter to her when I was feeling overwhelmed over an imminent economics exam. Then I wrote, “After I finished writing, though, I decided I’m not going to send it to you. It’s just word vomit, a therapeutic way for me to just get all that stress out on paper to a recipient that I know who, if I sent it, would read every word and listen to my lamentation. So even though it will be perhaps the first of many letters unsent, I just wanted to thank you for all the love that you have expressed to me over the years and just being there for me, even when you might not realize it.”

There are times where we meet someone and before getting to them or they us, we know we just want everything to do with them and we’re driven to pursue a relationship with them. Melissa was the first person I met with whom I felt that way. It was really strange to experience that drive of pursuit for the first time, and reflecting back I think it’s one of the ways God revealed Himself to me before I really knew Him. While I was still a sinner, while I still rebelled against Him, while I still rejected Him, He pursued me, with such perfect love that He sent His Son to die in my place so that I could have a relationship with Him. I did nothing to deserve His love (quite the opposite, in fact), but He knew that a relationship with Him was and is what I need to be fulfilled.

Since my first unsent letter seven years ago, I’ve written several more that were torn up, trashed, or let sit without ever reaching the recipient they were initially intended for. A few years ago, I started a notebook titled, “Letters to God.” In it, I write everything I want, good or bad, knowing He will read every word and listen to every lamentation, unburden me, and love me the same.