The Letters He Wrote Before She Was Born

In 2014, a young father in Chattanooga named Marcus Wheeler learned his wife was expecting their first child. That evening, he opened a leather journal and began writing letters to his daughter — months before she would take her first breath. He wrote about the way her mother laughed, about the oak tree in their backyard where he planned to hang a swing, about the hymns he hoped to teach her. He described the world she would enter and the people waiting to love her.

By the time baby Eliana arrived, Marcus had filled sixty-three pages. He knew her name, her nursery, the lullaby he would sing at 2 a.m. He had already mapped out a life of care for someone he had never seen face to face.

Marcus was just one imperfect father with a leather journal and a ballpoint pen. Imagine, then, the God who wrote not sixty-three pages but an entire book of days before we drew our first breath. The Psalmist says, "Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them."

The Almighty does not discover us at birth. He does not learn us over time. Before our mothers knew our names, the Most High had already searched us and known us completely — every thought, every step, every waking and every rest. His thoughts toward us outnumber the grains of sand.