It was Friday, April 13, 1973 when her letter came. I had been friends with Becky for about three and a half years at that time, and I still have fond memories of her, in spite of the letter she sent me. We were friends, not lovers, yet it sounded like the proverbial “Dear John” letter to me. Beyond the actual contents of the letter, there was an unmistakable tone which informed me that I had gone from being one of her close friends to being a very low priority.
I was a sophomore in college at the time, and Becky had dropped out of school at a different university and gone to work. The letter said she had met a man at work and they had gotten married on March 23, three weeks before I got the letter.
It is normal to congratulate a close friend when they get married. But I had assumed that if she decided to get married, I would be invited to the wedding, and I expected to meet the groom prior to the wedding. Unfortunately, I had never heard of him, and the marriage was a complete surprise.
Early the following summer I got in touch with Becky and asked her how all of this had come about. She said she had gone out with her husband once, brought him back to her apartment, and basically, he never left. In other words, the marriage was basically the culmination of a one-night stand, which today would be called “hooking up”. “Shacking up” was the less flattering phrase in 1973. This explanation of her marriage deepened my disappointment.
But in an effort to be a good sport, I asked if I could meet her husband, and I saw them together occasionally for the next couple of years. I didn’t like her husband, I didn’t like the way she chose him, and I didn’t like the way I found out about him.
Yet I’m not writing this to complain. In fact, Becky did me a great favor. When she wrote the letter, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it, and stuck it in the mailbox, she could not have guessed how her letter would change my life.
Figuratively speaking, Becky was not the real author of the letter. At the university, I had become bored with Darwin, Freud and Marx, and I was quietly searching for another source of wisdom. At the urging of a friend, I began reading the Bible in January 1973. I had many questions about its salvation by faith message, particularly because Becky was one of my closest friends, and she claimed to be an atheist.
Since God is invisible to all of us, is it fair for him to regard people who believe in him with greater favor than those who don’t? Are people of faith really better people, morally speaking? Would they treat me better? I was wrestling with these questions when Becky’s letter came. To be fair, I have had problems with some Christians since 1973 which were worse than the problem I had then with Becky. Yet I suspected that if I had been friends with a devout Christian, instead of Becky, she would have chosen her husband more carefully, I would have liked him, and I would have been invited to the wedding.
I have since come to the conclusion that even though the contents of her letter were terribly disappointing to me at the time, the invisible hand of God was the letter’s real author. God answered my questions, because they were honest questions, not just obstacles or roadblocks which I could have used as rationalizations or excuses. God is not afraid of anyone’s questions, and we all have some.
I became a Christian during the summer of 1973. Without a bit of malice or sarcasm, I want to close by saying, “Thank you Becky.”
