I correspond through letters with several WordPress writers. The first time Dawn, at Aging With Grace mailed me a letter I was intrigued by her return address stamp on the face of the envelope. It’s round and I hadn’t seen anything quite like it before. She sent me the link to where she purchased it, but I didn’t want to order one just like hers, even though there was something about it that sparked my heart. Whenever I scribbled my return address on the corner of the envelope, I knew there had to be a prettier way!

Last November, I saw some Christmas cards on Etsy that were beautiful in their simplicity. I ordered a few and they did not disappoint. I had forgotten the art of embossing until seeing these cards and remembered how I used to love going to the bank to get something notarized just to watch them use the embosser! (I know, it doesn’t take much) After some Googling I found a company that makes an embosser to reflect return addresses and my heart squealed!

After weeks of waiting and the delivery being rescheduled several times, the embosser arrives, but Barb is not happy with it. The words are spelled out in all caps and I was careful to choose a font that wasn’t all caps. I went ahead and used it on some envelopes and mailed the letters, but it bothered me to no end. Plus, the word, ‘Street’ had been abbreviated to, ‘ST’ while there was ample space to spell it out. I sent a Marco Polo to the Marvelous Mrs. M and whined about my disappointment with the embosser.

I shared with her about it being a custom order it cannot be returned, but she encouraged me to call the company to see if anything could be done, so I did and they were wonderful to work with. Come to find out, there was a technical glitch during the order process and auto-fill kicked in on their end capitalizing all the letters! Explaining to the customer service rep how I wanted it to look, compared to what I received, he discovered the technical glitch and offered to make a brand new one to my specifications for free.

Barb is happy. I think a lot of times in life we’re tempted to settle for the hand we’re dealt, but God wants His children happy. It’s up to us to keep inching forward for the desired outcome even when logically it seems impossible. I’m so grateful Mrs. M nudged me to dig deeper and reach out to the company, otherwise I probably would have stopped using the embosser and eventually discarded it. That would have been like throwing money in the trash.

Life is our classroom. May you pass every test.

Take a break from reading and listen instead.