Dear Cade

Since he wrote us a letter, I decided I oughta write him one. How fun it is to write love letters back and forth! Thank you Bo, from http://bostern.wordpress.com/ for your inspiration for my letter.

Dear Cade,


I look at you and see a boy who knows for sure that he is a fast runner, a good leader, a strong kicker and a smart thinker.

At nine, your only kryptonite is "perfectionism", but somehow your weakness with that seems to make everything else more charming. You love to play and love to win, but you also love to try. You give everything 110%, even though it scares the perfectionist in you to find your limits.

I love your spark, your joy, your refusal to – almost never - give up. I love that you believe in the goodness of the people around you and pray that someday you'll believe in the goodness in you. I love how your eyes twinkle when you are learning, that you crave to learn about anything and everything, including your insatiable desire to read the Bible.

But I wonder (and this is where the mom road gets a little rough)…

…who will be the first to bend your belief system? Someone will do it. Someone will make sure you understand that you aren’t that great or that fast or that kind. Someone will disregard your sparkling storytelling abilities and define you by your internal struggle to define everything in this world as black or white as you painfully learn, this is an impossible pursuit.

A boy who hasn’t been well-loved will want to become a winner by making you a loser. An insecure girl will make herself feel beautiful by convincing you that you are ugly. It will happen.

And sometimes – as crazy as it sounds – I am tempted to pave the way for the breaking. Sometimes I feel like I should prepare your heart for the sting of reality. To soften the blow of that moment when you will feel the rush of the wind, only to discover it’s someone passing you by; winning your race. I wrestle with the dueling desires to “build-you-up” and “let-you-down-easy” and so I ask for wisdom.

Wisdom that keeps me from speaking words that would define or destroy.

Wisdom that helps you learn to define yourself less in terms of black and white, because that system will only leave you believing you are less than your Creator made you to be, and more in terms of the beautiful rainbow of colors that make you YOU.

Wisdom that helps you find both your breaking and building in the arms of Jesus.

Wisdom, to hold you close and launch you freely into a world that isn’t kind, but so deeply needs someone a lot like you.

So I stand in the shadows of your indefatigable optimism and I pray that when the day comes that you discover that there are those who cannot cheer you on, no matter how much they may secretly want to; you will hold tightly to the knowledge that there are those who always will. No matter what.

We love you more than words can say,

your Mommy and Daddy, Bekah, Grandma, Grandpa, Nana, and Papa

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