Prison Diaries – The Letters

What do our letters, peacocks, and the Second Call all have in common?
Let me put all the pieces together:
1. I received a tea-cup for Christmas that has a female and male peacock picture on it. The male has his feathers all fanned out to woo the female. There are peonies around them, which according to the artist’s description represents the marriage to come.

2. Check it out: A sister-in-Christ, Melissa Flores, wrote about peacocks and their spiritual significance. http://definingwords.com/2010/03/15/spiritual-significance-of-the-peacock/

“As you see peacock paraphernalia in the coming days, remember that Father is wanting to reveal to the eyes of the church, His glory, wisdom, majesty, light, prophetic insight, new vision, and providence in ways you have never seen before.” Melissa Flores

God wants us to see Him, to see His Glory, to really know Him so that we can establish a union between His heart and ours!

3. In reading: The Ragamuffin Gospel, by Brennan Manning, he speaks in Chapter 9 of a point in time when we receive a Second Call. I believe I’m there! The Lord calls us to really examine our faith and to really understand Him, His Love, His Heart, and asks us the tough questions so we know in our knower what we believe about Him and what we believe about His Gospel.

“The second call invites us to serious reflection on the nature and quality of our faith in the gospel of grace, our hope in the new and not yet, and to a deeper, more mature commitment of faith where the naiveté, first fervor, and untested idealism of the morning and the first commitment have been seasoned with pain, rejection, failure, loneliness, and self-knowledge.” Brennan Manning

Ok, so let’s mix it all together!

Well, for Matthew and I, there has been a massive amount of letters written over the years. I have boxes and boxes of letters that for a long time now, I’ve wanted to create a mound with, on a large table, to show young adults, and explain that this, the giant mound of effort in communication, is what it takes to really know someone!

There are so many people getting married so quickly with no regard for actually knowing the person they are marrying, which is similar to our “naiveté, first fervor, and untested idealism of the morning and the first commitment” with the Lord, that we make.

But God wants us to really know Him, to know and understand His heart. He also wants us to know the person we would be married too this way!

The “Second Call” is the call for a union to be established between two hearts, and that takes knowledge of their heart, and understanding of their heart! It is the “Second Call” that establishes what we know in our knower about what God and that person thinks, and who they really are!

For us, the letters have given the space and time to ask the tough questions, to communicate our hearts and minds to each other, and the letters allowed the distance to respond with thought and honesty.

With God, The Bible is His letters to us, and prayer time with Him is vital, so that we would really and truly come to know Him, His heart, and His mind.

How we see Him directly relates to and effects what our relationship will be with Him. The same can be said for our relationships with others. Let’s see all we can in the Lord and in others.

When we stand before God to take that person as our spouse, we must know who it is we are becoming one with. The “Second Call” is a time to recommit, to take our vows over again, but in the second repeating of the vows there is to be a knowing, a depth of understanding that makes the commitment even more precious and profound.