Letter to you, young man

Letter to You, Young Man

by Robert Jordan

When I close my eyes,
I still see you.
A boy trying to look unbreakable,
hiding tears behind his teeth,
learning too early how to wear silence like armor.
The world felt too loud for your thoughts,
too heavy for your lungs,
and the ceiling above your bed
was your first confessional booth.

You used to stare up at it,
as if God had written the answers in invisible ink.
You kept asking what comes next,
as if life were a story you could skip to the ending of.
But, young man,
the truth is,
the middle is where the meaning lives.

I am wiser now.
Not because the years were gentle,
but because they taught me how to listen
when everything else went quiet.
I learned that peace isn’t silence.
It’s the sound of your soul breathing after the storm.
And I write to you now,
from a place where the rain finally stopped
trying to drown me
and started teaching me how to grow.

You won’t always understand your path.
You will walk through seasons
that feel like unanswered prayers.
You will mistake loneliness for punishment
and silence for abandonment.
But stay long enough.
You’ll realize even silence hums
if you learn how to listen to it.

You will lose your temper
before you find your purpose.
You will fail not from weakness,
but because growth requires surrender.
You will bleed for people who will never see your worth,
but you’ll rise wiser,
carrying their absence like an education.

No, life won’t get easier.
But it will get truer.
You will hurt.
You will doubt.
You will call out to God
and get thunder instead of answers.
But thunder, young man,
is just Heaven clearing its throat,
reminding you that even storms have rhythm.

You’ll come to understand your father’s silence differently.
You’ll see that strength doesn’t shout.
It shows up.
It’s in the man who keeps working
when nobody’s watching,
whose hands build quietly,
whose heart bends but does not break.
You’ll inherit that stillness.
And it’ll burn inside you like truth.

You will learn that anger is cheap,
but grace is wealth.
The world will tell you to harden.
Don’t.
Soft things shape the world too.
Rivers carve through rock,
roots split concrete,
and light breaks through every kind of dark.
Be like that.
Gentle, but unstoppable.

There is a lesson in stillness.
A holy kind of patience.
In those quiet mornings
where nothing happens,
that’s where the soul rearranges itself.
That’s where the boy fades,
and the man begins.

There will be days you feel invisible,
like the sun forgot your name.
But even in darkness,
flowers still bloom.
They just learn to reach for what eyes can’t see.

You will learn the language of endurance.
It’s not made of shouts or victory songs.
It’s built from showing up.
From forgiving the world
when it doesn’t deserve forgiveness.
From believing that love
is stronger than bitterness.

Pain will visit often,
but it is not your enemy.
It’s a sculptor.
It will carve humility into your chest,
wisdom into your tongue,
and gratitude into your breath.
Every scar you collect
will one day become a map,
proof that you survived every version of yourself.

And one morning,
you’ll look in the mirror
and no longer see the child
who begged for control.
You’ll see a man who understands
that control was never the goal.
Faith was.
Faith in the unseen.
Faith that broken glass
can still reflect the sunrise.

You’ll learn to notice beauty again.
The sound of rain tapping like memory.
The warmth of morning coffee.
The rhythm of your own heartbeat
whispering that even quiet things
are alive with purpose.

You’ll see how pain births compassion,
how endings make room for beginnings,
how even shadows
prove that light is nearby.
You’ll stop asking “why me”
and start whispering “thank you” instead.

You will learn to love slowly.
Not just others,
but the boy you used to be.
You will forgive him.
You will tell him his softness was never weakness.
You will tell him that peace
was never perfection.
It was presence.

And when you finally stand here,
where I am now,
you’ll look back and smile.
Nothing was wasted.
Not the nights you wept,
not the prayers that came back unanswered,
not the dreams that took their time.
Every ache, every silence, every doubt
was a seed.
And now,
you are the garden.

So walk slow, young man.
Don’t rush to arrive.
Don’t let pride steal your kindness.
Don’t let fear quiet your voice.
The world is heavy,
but so are you.
You were made to carry both burden and beauty
in the same hands.

And one day,
you’ll wake up to sunlight
that feels like forgiveness,
breathe in peace
that no one can take from you,
and realize
you were never broken.
You were just unfinished.

Because you,
my younger self,
were never lost.
You were just waiting
for me to come home
and finally see you.