Dear friend,
I want to tell you something tonight that I have been sitting with for weeks.
I started writing to you because I believed I had something to give. Fifty years of Scripture. Fifty years of watching the world through the lens of this Book. Fifty years of sitting with people in their hardest moments and learning, slowly, what actually helps and what does not.
I thought the exchange was simple. I would write. You would read. I would give something and you would receive it.
I was wrong about that.
You have given me something I did not know I needed. And I have been trying to find the right words to tell you what it is for weeks now. Today I am going to try.
Let me tell you what I mean specifically.
I have been with the Church for fifty years. And for most of those fifty years I have spoken to people in person. In confession booths. At bedsides. In hospital waiting rooms. In the pews after Mass when someone stays behind because they cannot quite leave yet.
I knew those people. I could see their faces. I knew their names and their families and the specific weight they were carrying on any given Tuesday.
When I started writing these letters I thought I was doing something smaller than that. Something more distant. Words going out into the dark toward people I would never meet, never see, never know by name.
And then your letters started arriving.
I want to tell you about some of what you have sent me. Not the names. Not the details. But the substance of it, because I think you deserve to know what your words have done.
A woman wrote to me and said she had not felt close to God in eleven years. Eleven years. And then she read one of these letters and something cracked open that she had given up on cracking open again. She did not ask me for anything. She just needed to tell someone.
A man wrote to me and said he had been carrying a specific fear about his country for so long that it had become background noise. Something he had stopped noticing because noticing it was too painful. He said reading Father Thomas was the first time in years he had felt like someone was watching the same thing he was watching and was not afraid of it.
A woman wrote to say she reads my letters to her husband who can no longer read for himself. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday she sits beside him and reads out loud. She said he closes his eyes and nods. That is all. He just nods.
I have been with the Church for fifty years. I have heard a great many things.
That one made me sit very still for a very long time.
Here is what you changed in me.
I came into this believing that the most important thing I could give you was clarity. A framework. A way of understanding what Scripture says about what is happening in the world. Something intellectual. Something organized. Something that would make the confusing legible.
And you showed me that is not what you needed most.
What you needed most was to not be alone in it.
Not the framework. Not the analysis. Not even the Scripture, as much as I believe in it. Just the knowledge that somewhere, an old man who has read this Book every morning for fifty years is watching the same things you are watching and is not afraid. That someone sees what you see. That someone takes it as seriously as you take it. That you are not crazy and you are not alone and the thing you have been feeling is real and it has a name and it has a history and it has a God who is not surprised by any of it.
That is what you taught me I was actually here to give.
And I would not have known it without your letters.
I want to be honest about something else.
Some of your letters have convicted me.
A man wrote to me and said he had been waiting for someone to say plainly what Scripture says about what is happening in this country. Not carefully. Not wrapped in qualifications. Just plainly. He said he was tired of voices that could see the truth but kept wrapping it in so many careful words that the truth got lost somewhere in the middle.
That letter sat with me for days.
Because I recognized myself in it. I have spent fifty years being careful. Fifty years making sure I did not say too much, too directly, too clearly, in case it was wrong or in case it hurt someone or in case it cost me something I was not ready to lose.
That letter is part of why I wrote They Tried To Stop Him: What The Bible Says About Donald Trump.
I wrote it because a man I have never met and will never meet told me, without knowing he was telling me, that careful was no longer enough. That the moment we are in required someone to walk straight into the centre of what they believed and say it plainly without flinching.
I tried to do that. I think it is the most direct thing I have written. If you have not read it yet I want you to read it this weekend. Not because I am trying to sell you something. Because a man whose name I do not know convicted me into writing it and I believe it belongs in your hands. You can find it by clicking the image below:
Alternatively, you may find it here: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I want to close with something simple tonight.
Thank you.
Not in a formal way. Not in the way you thank someone for a gift you were not expecting that you are not sure what to do with. In the way you thank someone who changed something in you without knowing they were doing it.
You changed something in me. You showed me what I was actually here for. You taught an old man who thought he was done being taught something genuinely new about what it means to serve the people God puts in front of you.
I did not expect that when I started writing to you.
I am more grateful for it than I know how to say.
God bless you, friend. Have a peaceful weekend. You have earned it more than you know.
With you in prayer always, Father Thomas
This weekend I want you to do two things:
One. Write to me. Seriously. Reply to this email and tell me one thing — one specific thing — that these letters have given you that you did not have before. I read every single one. I mean that. And after writing this letter tonight I want to hear from you more than usual.
Two. If you have been waiting to read They Tried To Stop Him — this is the weekend: https://fatherthomasletters.com/products/they-tried-to-stop-him-what-the-bible-says-about-donald-trump
I wrote it because you convicted me into writing it. The least I can do is make sure you read it.