Dear Sean

 

I remember the moment I fell in love with with my husband. It was the opposite of first sight. In fact we were probably a good 300km away from each other. I was sitting in my moms parked car outside the only grocery store that the little South African village of Winterton has and Stephen was sitting at his desk in Johannesburg distractedly text messaging a curly haired girl he had met while he was supposed to be writing some article on a 4x4 truck.

It was a text message that did it. I still remember the words - ‘carry the four’. Stephen had made a joke about math and I still laugh about it 11 years later.  I was so paralytic with mirth by the time my mom got back to the car that I could barely speak. 

It is also Stephen who has recently introduced me to your writing. He is the gift that keeps on giving. We wake up in the morning and silently read your next offering and if needs be we have our little post match chat about it as we prepare our children’s breakfast. That’s the joy of being eight hours ahead of you - we catch the worm early.

Stephen and I are both writers - Stephen is a journalist and I am a part time blogger and full time Drama and English teacher. Words are our thing. And now your words have become part of our thing. 

This year I decided to do something other than give up chocolate for Lent so I gave up social media and I wrote a blog post everyday for 40 days. Having to find something to write about for 40 days has been one of the most life changing things for me. Seeing as you do this permanently, every day, I can only imagine what your life must be like.

The thing is when you know you have to write something every day you start looking, listening, tasting, hearing, feeling in a very different way. You start getting to the core of things. And when you do that a short piece about the flavour of tomatoes can make a grown man cry.

And the description of the daughter you never had makes those with daughters find her essence in their own little girls. 

And when you invite people to believe that they are miracles they start believing,

Because words, when they are honest, do that.

And you do that.

I am no etymologist but I find the following phrase from scriptures particularly powerful - ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God’. I don’t know how the original Hebrew translation would have gone but it pretty much sums up a lot of things for me.

Without words, without The One who came in human form to share The Word, without parables that explain something unexplainable, without poetry, testimony, stories and letters we are nothing. And we are devoid of soul. That’s why, when children are falling apart with torment, the first thing we ask them to do is to ‘use your words’. Because without understanding there can be no empathy. Without words there is no connection.

So thank you Sean for bringing soul into the world, we are indebted to your honesty.

Thank you for ‘using your words’.

Love,

The curly haired girl from Winterton, South Africa

Emily