April 11, 2022
Dear James and Reida,
I hope that you are both in good health and the gospel is still in the center of your hearts. I feel compelled to write this letter as a final effort to reconcile pieces of the family. There are a couple eclipsing things that need to be verbalized. After Papa’s funeral, to which Tiffany and I were unwelcome, Grandmother told me with all sincerity that you greatly desired that your funeral would not be that way, and that you wanted all your family united on the front row together. In the most recent letter from you, dad, there was a mention of family legacy. I would like to speak to both of these. I think the division in the family is evident enough that I don’t need to speak to the funeral very much. The message to most of the family, both directly and indirectly, is that we aren’t welcome. Some won’t attend because they have been cut off and some won’t attend because your actions have caused you to be cut off. This is probably something that is pretty well understood at this point, but I feel the obvious needs to be stated so everyone understands that everything that has happened and that will happen is not the result of fleeting emotions, but thought out and executed decisions by sound minded people. There are no victims, all is cause and effect. The next thing I have to address is the idea of legacy. I have hesitated to point this out directly in the past, but as long as I’m stating the obvious, I’ll go ahead. I stated this more delicately in my previous letter, to which I received no reply, so I’ll say it more directly. So far there are 3 male heirs to the Stewart name, I can’t speak for Tim and his 2 boys, but I can speak for myself and Kilian, the oldest Stewart boy of his generation and the only Stewart boy in El Paso to carry on the Stewart legacy in El Paso. As it stands now, he has 1 photo with you, Grandmother, and that will be the only physical memory he will have of any Stewart in my lineage. He’s never known my mom and dad and I fear he never will. He will know that his grandparents and his great grandmother were conspirators, liars and scoundrels who, out of greed, attempted to defraud their own kin. He’ll know that after his dad’s uncle passed away, you all conspired to take advantage of his widow for your own personal gain. Cruel little cowards, hiding behind legal documents to exercise their greed in anonymity. There’s a reason Jesus warns about greed 10 times more than he warns about adultery or any other sin, because it’s exponentially more destructive. The only Stewart legacy left will be a dark one, one completely devoid of any of Christ’s teaching and one of greed and selfishness. The entire Stewart legacy will be reset with him, I’m not worthy of passing on any legacy myself. I will do all I can to raise him to love Christ and to walk in his ways and the only thing he will inherit from his ancestors is the knowledge that everyone can and will turn to evil. I hope that your future actions will be an example that those who turn to evil can always turn away and run back to Christ. I hope you can see now that while you thought you were cutting family off, you were actually cutting yourselves off. Is this really how you want to live the rest of your lives, isolated and left only as a toxic memory? I’m not saying any of these things to be coercive, it is a truth that I have known I will have to face in the future when my son starts asking about my family, and it would be wrong for me to keep it to myself. I love you both and I hope that a new relationship can arise from this, one of love and forgiveness and free of greed, selfishness and manipulation.
In love through Christ