Mama Marci mailed me a letter last week. It was in Joshua’s fireproof lockbox. It was one of the few things he chose to protect from everything that could destroy it, and I didn’t know it existed. He never told me he kept it.

I wrote it on February 18, 2001. I was eighteen. It was his birthday, and I was writing on Precious Moments stationary in teal ink. I’d just celebrated my own birthday, and I told him the past year had brought many exciting and new things, one of which was him.

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote to a man I loved: “As a man, you offer so much to this world. And as a man of God, you offer so much more. I am proud to call you my brother.”

I told him we both lose sight of the Kingdom at times. That what matters is that we return to it eagerly, hungry for joy that can only come from Him.

I was eighteen. I didn’t know yet that I was living with a mood disorder. I didn’t know I’d spend my twenties undiagnosed and my thirties searching for answers. I didn’t know that the man I was writing to would take his southern charm to Los Angeles and die too young at forty-four.

I couldn’t have known his death would wake me from an ambivalent existence and send me to Fort Monroe beach with a ukulele and a prayer.

I didn’t know his mother would become my Mama Marci—the brand of woman who follows your blog, calls on three-hour drives, and shows up at a screened-in porch with Christmas cards her son kept. I didn’t know her smile would become precious to me or how God would use her to stitch our lives together long after He took Josh home.

And I certainly didn’t know, at eighteen, that I would one day write the sentence that haunts me still: “For a woman like me who’s been loved well, settling on a match would dishonor the dead.” I wrote that on August 29, 2023, sitting on the beach where God met me every sunset that summer. I’d measured every man I’d met against Josh and none of them could hold a candle. Three days later, I stopped measuring.

Joshua saw something precious about me before I knew it myself. He kept the letter. Not in a drawer or a shoebox, in a fireproof lockbox where one might presume to place the things you can’t afford to lose.

What survives fire?

Ultimately, it’s not the things we accumulate. The furniture, the kitchen gadgets, the stuff that fills a garage? Those burn. What survives is what someone thought was worth protecting, irreplaceable or valuable things. A birth certificate or title, I’d guess. Coins or bonds.

Or a letter from an eighteen-year-old girl who didn’t know her own story yet but already knew where to find joy.

When Joshua died, I wrote that his death forced me to reevaluate the life I still had. That I couldn’t structure my career around a family that never materialized. That I needed to take the risk while I was still alive to take it. He woke me up. He shook something loose that I’d been burying under lesson plans and twelve-month salaries and the safe, comfortable, familiar routines that kept me from becoming who I was supposed to be.

But there’s something else Josh did that I didn’t understand until Marci opened that lockbox. He held onto my words. He decided, long before I believed it myself, that the girl who wrote about his character in Christ was someone worth keeping. Not accolades, not the labels—those don’t survive the fire.

Joshua kept what mattered: evidence that someone he loved was seeking God and finding her way.

Marci didn’t have to mail it to me. She could have read it, smiled, and tucked it back in the box, but she’s Mama Marci. She knew I needed it. She knew that a woman in the hardest season of her life might need to hear her own voice from twenty-five years ago, saying the same things she’s still saying now.

Return to the Kingdom eagerly. Hungry for joy that can only come from Him.

I wrote that at eighteen. I’ll probably write it again next year in some other form, from some other pier, after some other storm because that’s the thread the fire can’t touch. Not the circumstances, not the man, not the plan, but instead the faith underneath it all that keeps calling me back.

Joshua’s been gone almost three years now, but his lockbox held my words like a time capsule, and they arrived in my mailbox in the middle of the hardest fight of my life, in the same season I lost my voice and found it again on the page.

I once wrote that the people we intersect with in each venture matter more than the outcome we intended. That what doesn’t abide death are the accolades or labels. I was writing about Aunt Becky then, about Uncle Joe, about pursuits and people and poetry. But I was also writing about Josh—about a man who didn’t expect to die old, who loved passionately and took risks, and who tucked a teenager’s letter into a fireproof box like it was a deed to something sacred.

I signed that letter with 1 John 5:13: “I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”

I was writing to Joshua, but perhaps I was also writing to myself. Maybe God tucked that letter into a fireproof box twenty-five years ago so it would find me right here, right now, in the season when I needed to remember who I’ve always been.

Some things survive the fire. Faith was always there. It just needed a stamp and a mailbox to come home.