Life & Letters: May Your Child Be His Child

Monday, April 12, 2010

May Your Child Be His Child

A selection from a letter by John Newton to John Ryland, Jr. Ryland's wife, Elizabeth, had just given birth to their first and only child. Mrs. Ryland died a few weeks after giving birth. Newton wrote a letter of sympathy then but this letter was full of rejoicing for the little boy that graced their home. The letter was written December 16, 1786. Having a granddaughter born this past week, Nasia Marie Hewlett (pictured here), reminded me of Mr. Newton's prayer for the Rylands.

I will join you in praising the Lord for his goodness. May he crown the mercy by raising up Mrs. Ryland to praise him in his house. And may your child be his. You have now another comfort, another care, and what, if grace prevent not, might be another snare; but to those who feel their own weakness, grace is all-sufficient. My best wishes await you both.

Wise Counsel: John Newton’s Letter to John Ryland, Jr., edited by Grant Gordon, The Banner of Truth Trust, 2009, letter #36, p. 181.

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Why Life & Letters?

Before e-mails, telephones and text-messaging, people wrote letters to one another. Letters are personal and thoughtful. We can be thankful that biographers have letters to and from the people they write about from generations gone by, for modern forms of commu-nication leave us in want. Letters have a quality about them not found in e-mails. Historian and biographer, David McCullough, says, “I think often of how little we will leave about ourselves and our time in our own words. Maybe some of the e-mail will survive, but I doubt it. How will future gen-erations ever come to know us? Historians and biographers a hundred or three hundred years hence will have almost nothing of a personal kind to work with. Our story, consequently, will be a lot less interesting, less human, per-haps even impossible to write.”

It is a shame that few of us today craft letters to our children and friends. Letter writing is a lost art. I hope this blog will inspire others to write letters. Letters are valuable. C. H. Spurgeon said, “A man’s private letters often let you into the secrets of the heart.

Most of what appears here are selections taken from letters of Evangelical Christians. There will also be occasional reviews of books of letters.

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

"In the nineteenth century, many biographers wrote books titled The Life and Letters of So-and-So. While this was not always an eloquent way of writing history, it speaks volumes about our cultural distance; if restricted to composing a narrative of someone’s life around his written correspondence today, we wouldn’t be able to write biographies, because people write too few letters to constitute the substance of a book. Further, if you read those nineteenth-century letters, you cannot fail to notice how articulate, thoughtful, and well composed they commonly are. A culture that was accustomed to thoughtful, well-composed letters produced remarkable significant letters, even among fairly common people. Today, we have become a culture of telephone babblers, unskilled at the most basic questions of composition…"

Why Johnny Can’t Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers, by T. David Gordon, Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing, 2009, pp. 66-67.

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

Monday, April 12, 2010

May Your Child Be His Child

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Why Life & Letters?

Articulate, Thoughtful, and Well-Composed Letters

A Wonderful Book of Letters: "The Marvelous Riches of Savoring Christ: The Letters of Ruth Bryan"

A Sample Letter

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