Tender Letters is named after a word I almost passed over for a safer one. Gentle is careful. Tender is close, the word Scripture uses for God’s own mercy, and once I saw the difference, I knew it was the only honest name for this place.
Dear bunnies,
I was on the balcony, just in a camping chair, not doing anything that mattered. It was the kind of evening where the light goes soft before it goes dark, and I’d only stepped out to catch some air and let myself dream a little. I love dreaming. It costs nothing, and you never know when one turns into something real, in God’s own timing, whenever that is. I wasn’t expecting anything else from that evening.
That’s where the word found me. Not while I was trying to think of anything. I was just sitting there, letting my mind wander, when tender came back on its own.
You may know that kind of moment too. Somewhere quiet, not trying to solve anything, when a decision or a prayer or a name for something settles into place. A lot of true things get noticed in a stretch like that.
I had a list of options floating around before then. Clever ones. Safe ones. None of them felt true yet. Then tender came back, the way words do once you stop chasing them, and I almost wrote gentle instead without a second thought.
For years, gentle was the word I loved. It carries real weight in my heart, and I love gentle people, the kind whose gentleness feels natural instead of forced. But there was another word sitting behind it, easy to miss, that I’d never stopped to ask about. I’d read tender somewhere ordinary, long before that balcony, and something in my chest went still. Now, every time I hear it, I think of the Lord.
Tender means soft hearted and quick to feel, handled with care. Gentle is a manner. It’s how someone moves through a room. You can be gentle with a stranger. Tender asks more than that. It asks you to stay close and open instead of guarded, to feel what you’re holding, not just be careful not to break it.
Gentle and tender aren’t opposites, though. They tend to show up together. God is gentle in how He moves toward us, unhurried, never forcing His way in. And He is tender too, close enough to feel what we’re carrying, not only careful with it. One is the approach. The other is what closes the distance.
Luke 1:78 ties this to Zechariah. He’d stayed silent for months, ever since he doubted the angel who told him a son was coming. When his voice finally returned, at his son’s birth, this is what came out first: thanks that the light God had promised was breaking into the world in a person, not just a plan. He named tender mercy as the reason God came that close at all.
If you’ve been holding your days with care, checking things twice before you speak, keeping your prayers short and safe, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a real way of looking after yourself and the people around you. But you don’t have to keep God at that same careful distance to feel safe with Him. His mercy is tender, not just careful, and it can meet you wherever you are today, whether things feel steady or you’re still waiting on something that hasn’t moved yet. That mercy toward you isn’t something new He’s deciding on. It’s been there the whole time.
That’s the word this whole place is built on. Every letter here is written the way you’d write to someone you love, aimed at one person on purpose. Gentle in the care I put into writing it. Tender in how close I want you to feel while you read it. I wanted to write for people, for someone specific, even before I know their name. If a quiet evening like that one is what brought you here, I hope you feel it in this letter too.
Gentle would have been the safer name. Tender is the true one. It’s what I feel toward the people who end up here, and it’s the same word Scripture keeps using for what God feels toward us first. You don’t need the right words or a tidy prayer to reach Him. If all you have is a broken sentence, that still counts. Bring what you have. He’s close enough to hear it.
