Letters from the Table: Deepen Your Faith Journey

Why I Started Writing to God

There's a particular quiet in a hospital hallway at 2 a.m. I spent enough years in them — first as a nurse, later walking those same halls as an executive with a badge that opened more doors but somehow made me feel less useful — to know that quiet well. It's not peaceful. It's the kind of quiet that presses in on you until you have to say something, to someone, even if you're not sure anyone's listening.

That's where my first letter to God happened. Not at a desk. Not with a candle lit and soft music playing, the way I've seen it described in so many well-meaning devotionals. I wrote it on the back of a patient education handout because it was the only paper I had, sitting in a stairwell, because I didn't know what else to do with what I was carrying.

I didn't open with gratitude. I opened with I don't understand.

And that, I've come to believe, is exactly where God meets us. Not in our polish. In our honesty.

The Table Was Never About Having It Together

In my Greek family — Cretan roots, Sfakia stubbornness, if you know, you know — the table was never a place you had to arrive at clean. My yiayia's table welcomed you loud, tired, grieving, or joyful, and it didn't ask you to sort yourself out first. You came as you were, and there was always room.

I think that's what Christ actually meant when He said come. Not "come once you've figured it out." Not "come when your prayers sound eloquent." Just — come. Sit down. Let Me hear it, however it comes out.

Writing letters to God became my way of actually doing that instead of just believing it in theory. When I couldn't pray out loud without my voice breaking, I could still put pen to paper. The letters didn't need to be beautiful. They needed to be honest.

What I Learned From a Blended Family and Thirty-Three Letters

Somewhere along the way — raising six children who came to me through marriage, through loss, through grace, all of them mine in the ways that matter — I started writing letters not just to God, but to them. Little notes tucked into a chapter, into a birthday card, into nothing more than a moment when I needed to say something true and didn't trust myself to say it out loud.

What I found is that the letters that mattered most were never the ones where I had the answer. They were the ones where I simply told the truth about where I was, and then handed the rest to God. Lord, may she know she is not alone. Lord, may he forgive me for the years I got this wrong. Lord, may this table always have room.

That became a kind of prayer discipline I never planned on — and it changed how I hear His voice in the noise of an ordinary day.

An Invitation, Not an Assignment

I won't pretend this is a technique. I'm not going to tell you to set a timer or light a candle or "invite dialogue" with your recipient. If any of that helps you, wonderful — but that's not really what this is about.

This is about coming to the table honestly. Writing the sentence you're afraid to say out loud. Trusting that the God who hears prayers whispered in hospital stairwells at 2 a.m. also hears the ones scribbled on the back of whatever paper you can find.

If you've never written a letter to God, I'd gently invite you to try — not because it's a spiritual practice you should master, but because sometimes the pen says what the heart can't quite pray aloud. Start with the truth. He can handle the rest.

Come to the table. There's room for exactly who you are today.