Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night…

The mail came today.

The mail came yesterday too, and I fully expect, if anyone has sent me something, it will come tomorrow.

Other than sunset and sunrise, there aren’t many things in this world more reliable than the U.S. mail.

Most days we don’t even give it a thought, just open the box and grumble about the bills. But those bill are there every day – days when the snow is butt-cheek deep; days when it’s shirt-soaking hot and snot-freezing frigid. They’re there in the pounding rain, hammering hail, stifling humidity and on the lovliest June day we may ever be blessed with -- we get mail. We can count on it.

And since we can count on it, we do count on it. When we’re getting married, we mail the invitations. When it’s Aunt Judy’s birthday, we mail her card. The electric company mails us our bill, and when we’re late to pay and tell ‘em, “The check’s in the mail,” if the check doesn’t arrive the bill collector calls us, never thinking to blame the postmaster. If it’s in the mail, there’s not much chance it won’t get to where it’s going. In a dicey world, the post office is something we’ve come to trust.

And over the years, probably nobody has trusted the U.S. Post Office as thoroughly as the U.S. government itself. In time of peace, it depended on the Post Office to deliver the tax returns that paid the nation’s bills. In time of war, it depended on the Post Office to deliver the draft notices that mustered an army in its defense. The fact that the United States has had a post office long before there was a United States says a lot about how important delivering the mail has been.

Ben Franklin was put in charge of the Royal Mail in 1753, when the postal service was about the only thing that tied together the British colonies strung out along the eastern seaboard. Twenty years later, when the colonials were getting fed up with King George in general and British taxes in particular, the Committees of Correspondence made effective use of the royal mail to drum up discontent with his royal majesty. And when the disgruntled colonists got themselves organized, in July 1775, the Continental Congress put Ben in charge of organizing a new postal service for the colonies. A year later, that post office delivered copies of the Declaration of Independence to all corners of the new nation.

And the post office has been making those deliveries ever since. It’s pretty amazing when you think of it. Drop an envelope or a package in a blue steel box on a random street corner and a few days later it’s at the place you sent it – be it next door or in them most godawful back country boondock you can imagine. Nothing else, not Fed Ex, not the phone company, not Facebook or the internet can make that claim.

And that reach is worldwide. Send the pope a letter, the pope will get the letter. Whether he reads it is up to him – but we can count on it to be delivered. Reliable mail ties the world together.

It’s been that way for a long, long time. The famous post office motto … “Neither snow nor rain nor…” comes from an ancient Greek historian’s account of the mail service in the Persian Empire more than 500 years before Jesus was born. For that matter, Christians are reminded of the importance of the post office every time they read St. Paul’s letters – letters to the Romans, the Galatians and the two he mailed to the Corinthians. You have to figure that if the Lord trusted the mail with the first draft of the Bible, the mail is pretty doggone trustworthy.

And pretty doggone important.

You might want to send a letter to President Trump reminding him of that.