Reposting an earlier article 4U! If you love walking 🚶‍♂️❣️🚶, then this is 4U.

Author – Helen Olenjin

These days, everyone has forgotten the humble letterbox

My answer to this daily prompt at helenolenjin.life -“How important is spirituality in your life?”

To me, it is the most important thing especially when it comes to sharing the love of Jesus.

Spirituality makes me think of God, my soul, other souls and heaven’s work.

Spirituality doesn’t have to be complicated.

I look at my thumb and index/pointer finger. I see eternal thumbs and eternal fingers! An odd view I admit!

How did I even meet my spiritual hands?

Once during sleep paralysis, I couldn’t move and this caused me severe distress. Then I noticed something really weird happen. I felt my right spiritual hand rise out of my body instead. My physical right hand was still frozen on the bed.

Suddenly from above, a hand reached down and grabbed mine. It felt exactly like the union of two spiritual hands -God and mine. Was I in the body or out of the body? I could not tell.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Your Father,” the answer flashed back in my mind.

God is known as our Father!

Later on, I read this Bible verse, “For I hold you by your right hand— I, the LORD your God. And I say to you, don’t be afraid. I am here to help you.” (Isaiah 41:13)

God is even able to rescue us in distressing dreams and in that place between sleeping and waking!

This sleep paralysis state is terrifying.

But our God comforts us in our spirit with His spirit! Even in the dimension of sleep and dreams!

But back to real life now…..

As I woke up and continued on my journey, I completely forgot about this experience.

But today I am thinking about it all over again.

Does God want us to fight with Him to spread His love in our suburbs? Finger actions, count for eternity too!

In Australia, it is not illegal to drop a Christian tract off in someone’s letterbox.

Consider the action of picking up a Gospel tract with your legit thumb and fingers. Now slide it through your letterbox slot. Just as a pretend exercise.

Was that hard to do?

Even with physical muscle weakness, you could still use your spiritual God-given power for such simple goodness!

Your divine fingers are not flaky, or shaky and will be with you when your soul leaves your body! Why not use them long before you become all spirit? These invisible fingers are not just reserved for life after death.

In a physical sense, it takes more muscle power to toast and butter two slices of bread than to deliver the Word of God. Simply because the action of pushing the toaster handle down, requires a bit more strength and buttering, always requires more pressure.

The husband asks his wife, “Would you like me to spread butter on your toast?”

Never mind spreading the Gospel even though it takes even less muscle power!

Now, imagine you were a very depressed sad neighbour and you hated life. You did not have one single Bible in your home. You knew nothing about Jesus Christ. You never prayed and you didn’t believe in God. You didn’t even believe you had an eternal soul.

One day, you felt the worst than you ever had in your whole life. How could you not when you only believed your earthly shell had a quick expiry date! No hope of heaven and joy everlasting.

You went out to your letterbox wishing there was a happy flowery personal letter just for you.

You found only junk mail.

But you felt a nudge to go through the whole pile before tossing it.

This was God’s gentle nudge but you failed to recognise this.

You then saw something.

A Christian message.

A Christian had prayed for you and left a message of amazing hope there. This wasn’t a fake soul with a fake religious experience and fake fingers. This soul had radically transformed their life by God’s power and had to tell others. This was a salty soul who was perpetually sweet because they understood that they were the Jesus salt and light on the earth.

The person who left it had many physical limitations, couldn’t speak well, had severe arthritis, and often felt weak. But she thought, “Surely if I have the strength to go and buy a big bag of groceries and carry this, I can also carry just one tract for one empty letterbox.”

Bold strong heavenly fingers? Why not? They endure long “after” arthritis. Remember?

Even in old age, we will still bear fruit – Psalm 92:14.

In the tract, you read about God’s Word. You read the first few lines and put it in the bin.

A tiny seed was sown in your heart that God only saw.

It only took thirty seconds to plant that spiritual seed. You had no idea that God’s Word was sharper than any two-edged sword.

A voice of hope then whispered, “Life is not hopeless. God is real and will help you.”

This “small, almost zero-weight tract” was just one step.

But this began a healing process that brought you to your knees in prayer.

Then to a journey of soul searching.

“Maybe God really exists,” you thought.

Then you went to a church service for only one visit.

It all started with a weak elderly Christian neighbour who believed she never had an expiry date! Hence all the letterbox deliveries.

She loved blessing others through their letterboxes.

Hers was an almost weightless action. But it was still written down in heaven. God saw that one tiny step in her weak fingers, and He never forgot.   

Often we forget there are eternal souls all around us including our own.

We buy chips from Taco Bell, chicken from KFC, stamps from the local post office, and milk from a local shop. These purchases don’t have a soul. Yet they become the central thought in our minds. The people selling them are almost reduced to fiction. Like they don’t have a soul either. Like in so many online games we play today, we start to think like a machine with no soul.  

We forget that the smiling check-out assistant at our local petrol station who smiles so angelically at us is in deep spiritual darkness. She has a letterbox too. No one has ever dropped off a Hope Message to her.

She doesn’t even know how to find God! She doesn’t know how to pray.

(I was shocked when ministering to someone recently and they seemed genuinely puzzled. They didn’t know how to pray. How is it done, they wondered?)

Many Christians have walked past her home and forgot there was a lost sad soul living behind the crooked grubby letterbox.

Lost souls, machines, letterboxes and purchases all blend together and we often forget how vital belief in God is.

We forget how important our spiritual fingers are when we go out walking.

Why?

Because the walk feels so physical and “step counts” for eternity cannot be measured on our smartwatches.

“How can you and I share the love of God through just one letterbox?

I think about how many humble letterboxes I have walked past in my fifty-one years.

These empty letterboxes always belonged to a soul or a family of souls.

What missed opportunities to share the amazing things God did in my life.

The humble letterbox is not very important when it is empty.

These days the letterbox is easy to forget.

But the letterbox that holds the “Word of God”, contains the greatest treasure on earth.

One Job At A Time

Daily writing prompt
Describe your life in an alternate universe.

Firstly, let me explain something.

This is not a poetry post but you are all welcome to read my poems! They will really bless your day because God really blest me when I wrote them! Keep scrolling down to find them.

Yesterday was a really stressful day for me. When I saw this daily writing prompt I thought, “Yes! I would like to write about yesterday but in a way that if I lived IT again, this alternative here would be far better.”

This writing exercise is helping me to avoid the errors of yesterday.

So firstly, let’s talk about the actual universe I existed in yesterday.

I was acting like I had a strict deadline meaning the whole day was an emergency. In reality, the day was not that way.

  • I was feeling quite sick
  • I was helping my daughter with a job
  • I received a message that we owed over $2000 to a Government Department
  • I was doing personal laptop work relating to income, tax and finances
  • I was thinking about the guest coming tomorrow
  • I was thinking about the cleaning in the house that needed doing
  • I was thinking that I still hadn’t organised dinner for the family
  • I was thinking that I still hadn’t gone to the shops
  • I was stressed about a debt in the future that hadn’t even arrived yet

But as I analysed this later, I realised that there was only one job I needed to do, not all of the above! Even the one job I was doing, was not an emergency and I still had time to do it! I was operating with many fictional burdens that didn’t even exist but burdens that I was carrying even so.

Why?

I was essentially operating in a brainless fashion.

Stress does this to you. When you are stressed, it is easy to make poor decisions and your brain goes out the window.

I like to say, “Use your brain, don’t lose your brain.” Meaning….if you use your brain calmly, you will keep cool cognition flowing and you will function at peak performance.

Stress cannot be our driver, as it lies, distorts, thinks of the future and doesn’t operate with the mind of Christ.

Stress can operate without the brain, it specialises in mental crashes, including spiritual ones.

I even asked God yesterday, “Why do you leave me so broken?”

Meaning, I don’t want to feel stressed and struggle all the time! I want to feel what You are precisely telling us in Your Word. To remain permanently and perpetually calm.

As I think about all this now, I realised that I was not operating in God’s will yesterday. He already knew life was sinful, broken and messy but it did not need to be that sinful, that broken, that messy, in the way that I was operating outside His will. I was “over the top messy” with extra burdens that God didn’t tell me to carry and I was causing myself more pain by a completely unrealistic To Do List that God didn’t even write up for me.

In this alternate universe, I would go back and tweak yesterday. The whole day! I would change it by the hindsight I had today. I would live as God wanted me to live without the mess I had actually already experienced. I would live in this alternate universe, where God would be teaching me the whole time so that either living in the current or “other universe” I would be growing in both dimensions, the way God desired.

The good news? Even though we cannot go back and tweak yesterday, God already knows past, future and present.

There is no alternate universe for us. Not yet anyway!

But God is in all universes if they exist!

Based on His omnipresent leading, He will help you and me to live calmer today because He put this thought in our minds, “God will help me to trust Him as this is 100% His will, 100% of the time.”

Living in the spirit is the only way to maximise your spiritual coolness!

When you start getting hot in the flesh, like I did yesterday, a good thing to remember is to live like you only have one job to do.

Until that job is done, you only have one!

One job!

Forget the rest, dear Christian!

You could be in heaven by the end of the day.