Thankful

I am about to begin the process of writing my donor's family a thank you letter. The way it works, is you write your letter and send it to the chaplain at Emory (or whatever hospital you received your gift.) The chaplain proof reads the letter and takes things out that shouldn't be there. They have some pretty strict guidelines. From there, they send it to your donor's family. They can choose to respond or not. I really hope they write me back. I would love to learn more about my donor and eventually meet the family some day. According to my family, I was the recipient of a younger girl's liver. I'm not really sure how they know that, but that's what they said. I'm pretty young myself, so to think of someone even younger than me losing their life is so tragic and sad. Not a day goes by that I don't think about my donor or their family. I may make comments about what I should name my new liver or pulling the liver card, but that doesn't take away from me being VERY aware. Someone that lost their life gave ME a second chance and their family is probably still suffering.

 I'm struggling to write this letter, because one of the really strict guidelines is that you aren't supposed to mention religion or your faith in your letter to your donor's family. I suppose this is because your donor or donor's family could very well practice a different religion. This is difficult for me because  MY faith played such a huge part in the whole process from beginning to end. God was there. He's still here. How can I not bring Him up?

Also, how can you put into words the gratitude you feel when someone has given you the gift of life? To me, there's no words or material gift that can convey that. I thought about writing a poem to my donor's family, but then again, how do I do that without mentioning God?

More than anything (since I can't mention my religion) I want my donor's family to know about me. I want them to know that I will take great care of my precious new gift. I want them to know that I teach children and want to help people. Furthermore, I want them to know I want to make the world a better place and bring awareness to organ donation. Finally, they need to know that their loved one lives on, and through me will continue to help people.

Please pray that I can find the words to convey my gratitude to this precious family. 

XOXO

God Bless