The Foreword, the Prologue, and the first chapter are yours to read, with Graciela’s compliments. Leave your name, and she will write to you when the remaining six chapters open on October 21.
You are on the list — we will write to you the moment it opens.
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21 Envelopes · A True Story
Before the Story
Dedication · Foreword · Prologue
For my father
I dedicate my first book to my earthly father, Leonard Lucien Marques, who taught me to live life as an adventure. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro four times with me, and he took me and my family on many safaris in Tanzania, Kenya and Cameroon, and on travels to Malaysia, Singapore and many other countries. He was a hard worker and definitely a multitasker. I learned more from him on the farm and in the laboratories at home than I did in kindergarten. As a child I always thought that he could do no wrong. Yet my eyes and heart saw that he was not perfect. Instead, he was an imperfect human being like me. Thank you, Heavenly Father, that your unconditional love and grace did not forget my earthly father. You came back on that Sabbath eve to take him in your arms.
I met Graciela in the marketplace. I was pitching a school expansion project, talking fast the way you do when you believe in something and you have four minutes to prove it. She listened longer than she had to. Then she invited me into the Ekklesia Excelerator, and I said yes without understanding that I was saying yes to the transformation of my life.
For two and a half years now we have prayed at 5:50 in the morning, Monday through Friday. Ten minutes. I want to be honest about how small that sounded to me at the start. Ten minutes is the time it takes to find your keys. But ten minutes, five days a week, for two and a half years, has rearranged my heart, my home, and my understanding of family. I am raising two precious girls, and Graciela has prayed with me for them by name, week after week. I have watched God move in their lives. I did not walk into that prayer call expecting to be changed, but it has changed everything.
We have traveled together since. Israel. Jordan. There were days that felt lifted straight out of a film, and there were quieter days that took something out of me that needed to go. I have watched this woman pray in airports and on the sides of roads and in rooms where she did not speak the language, and I have watched doors open that had no business opening.
This summer we went to Washington, DC, and I stood in a room with Intercessors for America. Men and women had come in from every corner of the country to worship and to ask God to bless this nation, to pour Himself out over its government and over the generation coming up behind us. What struck me was not the sound of it. It was the arithmetic. Forty years of somebody’s mornings. Thirty years of somebody’s knees. Graciela among them, one more woman who had simply kept showing up.
On the water at Galilee, hands open, worshipping The One who planned it all.
For if you remain completely silent at this time, liberation and rescue will arise for the Jews from another place, and you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have attained royalty for such a time as this and for this very purpose?
That is Esther 4:14, in the Amplified. I used to read it as a verse about one brave girl. I have come to read it as a verse about timing, and about the fact that a life can be positioned long before it is asked for anything.
Washington, DC. Three crosses on the Mall, and God answering.
Here is what I believe we are short of. Not faith. Stories. There is a bridge between the generations that has fallen in, and it will not be rebuilt by strategy. It gets rebuilt when somebody older tells the truth about what God actually did, in order, with the dates and the names and the parts that did not make sense at the time. My generation is not indifferent to that. We are hungry for it, and we do not always know how to ask.
Intercessors for America. A room of people who have been interceding for decades.
And the generation ahead of us needs to hear this: we want you. We want your presence, your wisdom, your stories. Not the polished version. The one where the roads flooded and you went anyway.
Jordan, at the water. Two generations, one trip.
What follows is one woman’s account of twenty-one envelopes and what happened when she gave them away. It is specific, which is how you know it is true. Read it and you will understand why I said yes, and why I am still saying it.
Before there were twenty-one envelopes, before my father’s bag, before a single one of the divine appointments in this book — there was a thirteen-year-old girl who very nearly did not live to see any of it.
That girl was me.
I grew up on the island of Aruba, where the trade wind never quite stops and the light comes down white and hot off the sea, and I played volleyball for a school named after a Dutch queen. One afternoon, in the middle of a game — the gym close and bright, our shoes squeaking on the floor — I was laughing so hard at something that I never heard the whistle blow. The server behind me struck the ball, and I turned at exactly the wrong moment, and it caught me hard against the side of my head, with a sound like a knock on a door. I felt something go loose inside — the way water shifts when you tip a glass.
“Marques, off,” the coach said. I went and sat on the bench and held my head up with my hands, because it would not stay up on its own. Nobody thought much of it. The game went on. I rode home holding my head, and that night, at my cousin’s birthday party, with all its noise and its paper and its cake, I couldn’t play at all. I went to lie down. The last thing I remember is my father lifting me up and carrying me out to the car to take me home.
After that, I remember nothing. What happened next I only know because my father wrote it all down — he was a scientist, and he kept careful records. The next morning I would not get up, and when my mother came to wake me she found I was already far away. My father gathered me into his arms, put me in my mother’s lap in the car and instructed her to keep blowing air into my mouth, and drove faster than he should have to my uncle’s clinic, telling my mother the whole way not to stop — don’t stop — helping her breathe. There was an ambulance waiting there. The doctor pushed a needle into my skull, top right, to take the pressure off my brain. And then there was a long, dark quiet that lasted six months and five days.
The whole time, people prayed. My praying friends, my aunts, our church, the neighbors — they came and stood around that hospital, out in the heat, and prayed. After a few days my eyes would open and close, but I was not there behind them, and slowly most people stopped coming. Not my father. Every single day he sat by my bed and read to me as if I could hear every word — Shakespeare, the newspaper in three languages, the news he’d gathered from my friends at school, my favorite books. His voice was low, and steady, and it went on for hours. “I have no idea what I just read,” he would say, closing a book. “Now — what shall I read you next?”
And one day, I answered him.
I could not speak out loud, but he wrote down what I told him: how I had seen a bright light, and how, over there, they had everything a person could ever want. Dad, why did you call me back? Whatever you want, they have it there.
And my father said to me, “I will give you whatever you want. Don’t go back over there anymore. Stay here with me.”
(If those words sound familiar, it is because I would say almost the very same ones to him, many years later, at the end of his life — only the other way around. But that is the last chapter of this story, not the first.)
My uncle, who was a doctor, had told my father the truth as he understood it: I would die in the coma, or stay in it forever, or wake as someone who was no longer really there. Three doors, he said, and not one of them good. Go on with your life, he told my father. Her state is not going to change.
But my state did change. And I have to tell you how, because it is the reason I understand everything else in this book.
I had a great-grandmother who loved my mother as her own, and raised her almost like a queen. The good plates came out on ordinary days, and her hair was brushed and braided before school. That was in the years when my mother’s own family had pushed her aside. So the day the ball struck me, it was not me she grieved for first. It was my mother. One year. That was all the time that had passed. One year since my mother had buried her firstborn son, and now her lastborn lay in a coma. The house had not finished being quiet from the first. And on a certain day, while I lay in that coma, my great-grandmother rose and ironed all of her clothes, until the room smelled of warm cotton, and she wrote out everything she owned and to whom it should go. Then she dressed herself in her burial clothes, and she lay down, and she prayed a prayer she had written by hand. I have loved this child as my own, she prayed. You have promised great things for this family. Angenita has suffered enough. Take my life, and save her daughter. Let my little Graciela live, and take me instead. I am ready. That night she went to sleep, and did not wake.
My great-grandmother, who traded her life for mine
And that was the morning I opened my eyes.
They flew me to the next island, to the very first MRI machine of its kind ever sent to the whole Caribbean, and a specialist studied every picture of the inside of my head — and found nothing. No evidence of injury. No brain hemorrhage. No mark where the needle had gone in. No reason at all. “I can find no medical reason,” he told me, “why you cannot go and do anything you want with your life.” A month later a little two-inch streak of gray hair appeared, right where the needle had been, and it stayed. Gray all through my school years, white as a crown now. So whenever someone asks me how my hair came to be this way, I get to tell them the truth: I was reminded that something bad had happened to me, and God saved me. Now, at sixty-nine, four years without coloring my hair, it is snow white.
“Don’t you color your hair?” they ask me. I say no.
When I could utter my first words and take strong steps, I went to see the heart doctor who had helped my house doctor resuscitate me. I walked into his office and said, “Thank you for saving my life.” Here was a learned man, a man who had never once in his life believed in a higher being, and even he sat me down afterward, having checked me thoroughly, with tears in his eyes. “I did not save your life,” he said. “Someone far greater than I am did that. And you owe your life to Him.” It took a long time to walk again, and longer to speak. For years afterward the headaches came and would not leave, and I took a little pill for them, until the day I learned how the pill was doing me harm — and I handed it to God and told Him I would never lean on it again. I never have. My father used to tell me, in those days, out in the warm sun of my mother’s garden, that everything is possible. I have since learned the two words that finish that sentence: but God.
When my great-grandmother was buried, my mother brought me a pair of earrings she had set aside for me, earrings my great-grandfather had made, long ago, as a wedding gift for the very woman who would one day trade her life for mine. They were heavy, and old, and warm from her hands. Remember them. You will meet them again, near the end.
I grew up knowing something most children never have to learn so young: that I was alive on purpose, and at a cost, and that a life handed back to you was never meant to be kept. It was meant to be given away.
So years later, when my father died, and I opened his bag, and made twenty-one stacks, and found twenty-one empty envelopes waiting inside — somewhere deep down, I already knew what I was going to do with them.
So I sat there and started making stacks — one stack to an envelope, and I sealed them, and I numbered them.
There was a big chair in my father’s hospital room, where the light stayed low and the machines ticked softly through the dark, and at night I would lie back in it and hold on to him. He would hold my arms, and I would hold his, all night long. My sister took the days. I took the nights. In between, I drove three hours back to Santa Clara to work, and then drove back again — back and forth, back and forth, the whole time he was in the hospital. He said, “Graciela, take me home. I do not want to be here.” My parents were divorced, but my mother came every single day to help take care of him, along with my sister, Lilly. Lilly and I did this for both our parents. We prayed for an island caregiver who believed the Bible, and within two hours God sent us Sai, from Fiji.
The night before he died, he could barely talk. But he pointed, and he got out a question.
“Do you remember my investment account?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Do you remember the password?”
“No, Dad. I’d have to look it up.”
“Ah,” he said.
And then this man who could hardly finish a sentence told me both passwords, for both accounts — the numbers, the capital letters, the whole shebang.
That was my father. Clear all the way to the end.
The night before I prayed a prayer I never thought I would pray. God, please take my dad before the Shabbat comes in. Please don’t let him suffer. I beg you.
The next day, Friday, my daughter Allison came up with me. “Get your iPad,” I told her. “Play all the songs from the places where Opa used to live.” Opa means grandpa. She played them, one after another, and one of the last ones was a song called “Kilimanjaro,” with a choir singing. He had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro four times. Nineteen thousand three hundred and forty feet, four times, in one lifetime.
My father
My mother was on the other side of the bed, massaging him. Allison and I were on the window side. Outside, the sun was going down, turning the window gold, and the Shabbat was coming in with it.
I leaned close to his ear. “Dad, I want to remind you. You’re going to see Jesus, and He’ll be dressed in white, and there will be a bright light all around Him. When you see Him, reach your hand out to Him.”
He couldn’t answer anymore. But I saw the tops of his cheeks lift — just a glimpse.
There was something I needed to say to him, because we’d had this conversation once before, only the other way around. Years ago, I had been in a coma. When I came out of it, I kept talking about a bright light, about how over there they had everything you could ever want. And my father told me, “Don’t go back over there. I’ll give you everything you want.”
Now it was my turn to tell him.
“Go there, Dad,” I said. “If you see any fire, any hot things, don’t go there. Go where the bright light is, and the face of Jesus.” I told him not to be afraid. “Jesus has all the power in heaven and on earth, and He loves you. I know you’ve had some hard things, made some bad choices in your life. But Jesus loves you, Dad. Jesus loves you.”
“Allison,” I said. “Keep playing the song.”
The sun kept going down. Behind us, the window got so dark, and I said, “No, God. Don’t let him live another day.”
And then — just like something I once saw in a cartoon — the sun went down, and then it came back.
When it came back, it showed only on my dad’s face. The rest of the room was dark. My mom was holding on to the side of the bed.
Allison said, “Mom, what’s happening?”
“Allison,” I said, “you have the privilege of witnessing the power of God. Watch this. Watch this.”
The light was shining directly on him. He took three breaths. And then life left him, and the sun went away.
Allison said, “Mom, is this how it always happens?”
“No,” I told her. “But God has allowed you to see it. He’s allowed you to see the blessing of dying, and living with Him.”
That morning, before any of it, his caregiver Sai had told me it would be my father’s last day. She was right. By then he could no longer talk. Sai bathed him in his bed that morning, and my mother sat with him after that, keeping him cool. The day before, when he could still find the words, he had told my mother: “I am going now, so you have to take care of the kids.” And she had told him, “Don’t worry, Leo. I will take good care of them.” Before the sun started down, my sister Lilly and Sai went out for an early dinner. They had been gone just one hour and were already on their way back when I texted them that he had gone. My mother had his oils, and they washed him completely, with warm water and his oils, and dressed him in his Indonesian outfit — the whole outfit. That is how he went.
We waited for all the grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come and say goodbye to his body. The coroner and hospice set the time of death, and the funeral home picked up his body four hours later, for cremation. And then we sat up and talked the whole night.
That was when I saw the bag.
It was his — brown, made of Surinam alligator leather, worn smooth and dark at the corners. Three days earlier, while he could still speak clearly, he had told me himself that it was mine — the one gift he wanted me to have. I told my sister, “Dad wanted me to have this bag. But if you have any objections, I’d be glad to share it with everybody.”
Allison had heard him. Back when my father could still talk, she’d heard him say one word about that bag.
“No.”
My sister said, “No — he gave that to you. You need to have it.” So I took it.
When I got home to Campbell, I dumped everything out. Allison was there. “Mom,” she said, “how do we know how much money you have? It’s all bills and coins from different countries.” “Help me sort it,” I said. “Put the different countries together.” So we did.
After we took care of the burial and the ceremony, I took a lot of it to be exchanged. When I came home, I had a bag full of US dollars — and a lot of Susan B. Anthony coins and two-dollar bills.
I dumped it all out on the bed. “Can you help me?” I asked Allison.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to prepare for an exam.”
“That’s okay.”
I already had a trip planned. Five weeks in Asia. Two weeks in Cambodia and three in the Philippines, booked eight months before my father died, back when he was still well and none of this was coming. So the money was not going to sit in a drawer. It had somewhere to be.
So I sat there and started making stacks. I never counted the money. I never even looked at what kind of bills they were. I just pushed them into piles — like shoveling cards, the bills soft and creased from a hundred hands — until I’d made twenty-one stacks.
Why twenty-one? Only God knows. I didn’t plan it, and I didn’t count to it. There were just twenty-one.
Then a practical worry hit me. How was I going to carry all this money? I’d better figure out how much it is, I thought — they might stop me, might even put me in jail for bringing that much. So I went back into my father’s bag. And inside it — the same bag that had held all the coins — there was a little box. And inside the box were envelopes.
I counted them. This part I counted.
Twenty-one.
Exactly twenty-one envelopes, for exactly twenty-one stacks I had made without ever counting.
So I put the money in, one stack to an envelope, and I sealed them, and I numbered them. Envelope one. Envelope two. Envelope three. All the way to twenty-one.
I never knew how much was inside any of them. I still don’t. But God knew. Exactly. There were hundreds and fifties and twenties, tens, fives, ones — all mixed in — and God knew exactly how much was there.
Everything was twenty-one.
Twenty-one stacks I never counted. Twenty-one envelopes I sealed and numbered. And that was where it started.
The Foreword, the Prologue, and Chapter 1 are yours to read now, as a gift.Chapters 2 through 7 open for purchase on October 21, one at a time or all six together.
Before the Story
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Mon, Sep 21
Chapters 2–7 open for purchase
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Oct 21 · single or bundle
Printed edition
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Nov 16 · or sooner
Audible
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Dec 4 · Hanukkah
The Story
What he never explained.
For as long as I can remember, my father kept a brown bag of Surinam alligator leather — a small, heavy museum of coins and stamps and paper money from every place he had ever lived or travelled. It was our thing; he had helped me get one of my own, and one for each of my children too. He wanted me to have it, and it was only after he was gone that I understood why.
When I opened it, I emptied out the coins, exchanged what I could, and sat on my bed pushing the bills into stacks — never counting, never even looking at what they were. I made twenty-one. Then I found a little box still inside the bag, and the plain envelopes in it. Those I counted. There were exactly twenty-one.
So I slid one stack into each envelope, sealed them, and numbered them by hand. I never knew how much was in any of them. I still don’t. But God knew — exactly. This book is that journey, told the way he would have told it: in no hurry at all.
The Book
one book · seven chapters
Opened one at a time.
The whole story is here, in seven chapters. Each chapter opens more of the envelopes — so you can walk it the way it was lived, one letter, one lesson, at a time.
Chapters 2 through 7 open for purchase October 21 — one at a time, or all six together. Sign on below, and we will tell you the day they open.
From the pages
I never knew how much was inside any of them. I still don't. But God knew. Exactly.
21 Envelopes · Chapter 1
The Author
Graciela Marques-Hahn
Graciela writes for the eight-year-old and the eighty-year-old in the same breath — short, true sentences carrying more than they let on. Faith runs through her pages the way it ran through her father's: present, unforced, woven into ordinary days.
21 Envelopes is her account of a gift she had not earned and could not keep to herself — and of learning, one envelope at a time, what it means to give, and to let go.
Stay in the story
Be there when the chapters open.
Chapters 2 through 7 open for purchase October 21. Leave your name, and we will write to you the day they do — nothing more, nothing louder.
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