Dear Dad

My father, Leonard, is 62 years old today. This note is for him.

Dear Dad,

Hope, health, and happiness are the first of many treasures of the heart I wish for you. I am kind of a dreamer, so I have many more wishes for you. It would be tedious to number them all, and there is not room enough in this note. However, I can sum them all in one dream, one wish: God.

I wish that you may know and feel in your heart, in a way you never experienced before, how God touches your life.

I wish you could know, with the spiritual sense beyond our bodily senses, how real, how present, how near God is to ourselves.

There is nothing greater I could hope for you. There is nothing else in comparison to this I could offer to your heart. Neither now nor at any time in my life have I had anything of my own that would make a fitting return to you for the life you and Mom consented with God to give me. Therefore I give you on your birthday my most fervent prayers that God, the giver of dreams, will come to you in your nights and show you traces of grace in all your days.

Have a happy birthday, Dad. May Jesus, God's very Son, add a blessing to these words from your poor son.