This is Daynie Cutler's feature story about her founding of "Love Letters Mailbox" in 2021. Read more here.
In early 2021, I was going through probably the most difficult and heavy season of my life thus far. I had just walked away from an incredibly toxic relationship and lost the majority of my friends along with it, I had 0 relationship with the Lord and was relying on substances to ease the burden of it all… it felt like every aspect of my life was crashing down in front of me. I was a wreck and didn’t have any idea how to begin rebuilding my life. So, I didn’t. Instead, I sat back and did what felt easiest to do at the time – I surrendered, not intentionally in a spiritual sense, more so in a “I have no energy or willingness to do anything else” sense. My own efforts to better myself clearly weren’t working, so I just stopped trying altogether.
Getting through the days was difficult and the only thing that seemed to make it better was going to the park my dad used to take my siblings and me to growing up. It's a huge drop-off over the water and it was where my father and his friends spent a lot of time together as teenagers. When I got my license, my friends and I followed in my dad's footsteps and spent lots of summer evenings there – watching the sunset or barefoot, climbing up the old oak trees surrounding the oceanfront. Now, it served a different purpose for me…It was the only place I could go to get away and take my mind off everything happening around me. Reality felt so distant when I was there. I would sit on the big rock that looked out upon the water for hours and think, and read, and write, and rest.
After months of finding solitude at this sweet little spot, the idea came to me.
I realized that I couldn’t be the only person who came to this park for peace and quiet, and I wanted to know what the others who visited this spot were going through – good and bad.
I remembered the fallen mailbox sitting on the curb in front of the abandoned house down the street that I’d seen earlier in the week, and it was like all the pieces started falling into place in my mind.
I scouted out a tree that felt right and went a few days later to put the mailbox in place. I filled the box with pens and a little blue notebook and wrote an opening letter encouraging people to write about whatever they wanted, “-their hopes, their fears, a love letter to someone near or far…”
Within the first few weeks of the mailbox being in place, people had already begun opening up in the most beautiful ways.
One letter that was left behind early on has stuck with me so deeply that I will likely never forget it.
It was a father writing to his daughter who had passed. I don't feel like it's my place to share his words, but I will say that reading that letter was when I realized how special this was. This man was dealing with one of the worst things I could ever imagine having to go through, and he was able to find comfort, even for just a moment in sharing this feeling with hundreds of strangers in something as vulnerable as a love letter. He could be a neighbor, a friend, someone I drove past on the way to the grocery store, and I would never even know, yet I carry him in my heart every day and even to this day pray for him often because of his simple act of writing in a notebook I left behind.
The connectedness that vulnerability creates is unreal.
As cliché as it sounds, these letters written by strangers helped me recognize I wasn’t as alone as I felt. The sadness in my life felt so heavy, but I realized that love is all around me even if it isn’t necessarily about me. It brought me hope.
Since then, I’ve gotten the opportunity to set up about a dozen mailboxes across the state of Florida that have been filled with thousands of letters. Letters of hope, loss, secrets, heartbreaking accounts of people missed, and with love letters. Love letters written to people far away, to people sitting right next to the author, to people missed, to people passed, to family, to friends, and even a proposal.
The diversity of people writing is so crazy to wrap my head around. It feels so much bigger than I ever imagined it would be. It’s so special to read these stories written by strangers, and to get a glimpse of the lives of the people around me. Reading their page in these little blue notebooks may be my only interaction with them in my entire life, but I think that’s what makes it even more significant.
Now, 4 years later, I can recognize that God gave this idea to me.
He knew how much I needed a glimpse of hope and something to hold onto during that period of my life. And isn’t it just like Him to turn mourning into dancing?
I think about how many times I’ve felt so blessed through this project and how many incredible opportunities I’ve been given because of it. It’s just so crazy to fathom that it began out of such sadness and is now something so beautiful in my life.
How sweet is it that when we give God the space to move in our lives (whether intentionally or simply out of desperation), He comes up with something way better than we could’ve ever imagined? I could’ve literally never dreamed or planned this outcome by myself.
Let this be your reminder that His plans are greater than ours. And if you see a mailbox of mine, leave a letter and tell someone you love them.
<3,
Daynie
@lovelettersmailbox
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