A Story Post: THE FIRST OF THE IMPOSSIBLE LETTERS

A little over a year ago I started receiving these letters.  They'd be slipped underneath my apartment door when I wasn't looking.  Sometimes I was home when it happened, sometimes I wasn't.  It was beyond unnerving either way, but finding this thick parchment envelope with nothing but my name on it on the floor next to the door after I'd been home for hours...I can't describe to you how creepy it was.  And something about all the references to God and stuff rattled me - even though I'm a Christian and grew up a pastors' kid...  Maybe because they topped it off by signing every letter "Fire."  Other than some sort of pyro-serial-killer, what kind of person calls themselves "Fire?" 

I tried to get the police involved at first, but all the officer said was that, since no one was actually breaking into my apartment and there was nothing threatening in the letters, there was nothing they could do.  I could barely afford rent, so I figured a security camera was out of the question.  (Not that it would've been allowed in my building).  And it was complicated.  The whole thing was complicated in my mind.  

The letters helped.  I didn't understand them completely, but they helped.  At the same time, though, whoever wrote them knew things about me they shouldn't have known.  They knew things about what was going on in my head.  They knew the random thoughts I sometimes wrote on little pieces of paper - just to get stuff out and try to make sense of things - which I shoved in my pockets or in the book I was reading.  They would quote them back to me in the letters and I would dig the little papers out of my pockets or wherever and just freak out because...how did they know?!  How did whoever this was even see them?  It's not like I left the papers somewhere!  I still had them!

I fixated on the papers for a while.  I came up with all kinds of theories.  I was suspicious of everyone.  But the letter-writer still knew things...way more than I had ever written down.  That and something someone told me recently makes me think that this "Fire" isn't human.  Do with that whatever you want, I suppose.  I just felt that the letters might help someone else too.  So, I'm posting them on here, with a little of my story.

Here goes with the first letter, then...  My depression had flared up pretty badly the day I received this...

Dear Alexa,
          Your struggle is not unseen.

"How do you bear it?  The pain every one of you exists within...  It snakes through every crack and crevice, every ray of light.  It pulls me down to suffocate and torture the very air from my lungs.  Healing seems impossible; for the wounds are too numerous.  Beauty seems useless and even offensive.  Why spend time on such trivialities when so much is wrong and so many suffer?  Why even speak to you about it?  Even if you learn to care, what can we do to help...the few who feel this pain?"

          You wrote these words as the late afternoon sun streamed through the window, casting impressive shadows while simultaneously picking out certain objects to illuminate with divine fire.  It called to you.  Beauty is not useless, Little One.  I know you think it exists like a kind of anesthesia, rendering the source of your own pain impossible to find.  Dulling your mind to that little ache which underlies everything and just won't go away, and which, sometimes, raises its gruesome body from its burrow in your heart and screams its agony too loudly for you to do anything other than put your hands over your ears and scream with it...but that is not what it is meant for.  It's meant to draw you to the Truth.  You do feel their pain.  You throb with it.  You see the ugliness in the world and it makes you writhe in frustration and grief.  But this burden is not yours!  Give it to the One to whom it belongs!  The wounds are not too numerous for Him!  Even your own pain is too much for you.  It suffocates and tortures.  It is not to be glossed over or denied.  It is a mystery that will be solved.  It is a secret wound that will be found and healed.  It is a curse that will be dug up like buried treasure - hidden to infect - and broken and burned and redeemed.  You must trust the King.  It will take time.  Rest in Him and His love.

With great affection,

Fire