One Last Letter to a Child

I know I have been strangely absent here. It would take a bit to explain. This blog has been such a place of health for me that even the doctor I see for depression asks if I've been blogging as a measure of how well or not well I'm doing. She called it "the canary in the coal mine" test. It comes from an old mining custom of trying to see if the mines were safe. Given that my mother's father was a coal miner, it seems somehow appropriate. Anyway, gases were invisible and often deadly. To safe guard the miners, they would lower a canary or other small bird down into the mine first and then pull it back up. If it survived it was safe to go down into the mines.

Blogging today is my effort to make that canary sing in the depths of the mine. But over the last week, I've felt as if my words have left me.

I don't really want to dwell on the specifics of everything. But I did want to ask you a totally unrelated question. I've been sponsoring Delia through Compassion. The end of July I got the sad news that Delia had left the program.(Click here for a specific post about that.) But since that day, I've gotten two more letters from her. One was dated the end of April. The one I got today was dated July 16th.

I called Compassion today and asked if I might send her one last letter.

I am pleased to be able to do this, but unsure of what to say and where to begin. So, if you were a child of 11 and were to receive one last letter from your sponsor, what would be most helpful to hear? Putting it another way, what would your heart cry out to share with a child if you had one more chance to share your heart with without overwhelming her?