Letters to God
The headline of this story is “Letters to God End Up in Ocean, Unread”  which really caught my attention. If letters are dumped somewhere undelivered and unopened, the one…er…the One who knows their contents is God.
Some of the letters are comical (a man asking God to let him win the lottery, twice), others are heartbreaking (a distraught teen asking forgiveness for an abortion, an unwed mother pleading with God to make the baby’s father marry her). The letters about 300 in all, sent to a New Jersey minister ended up dumped in the ocean, most of them unopened.
The minister died two years ago at 79. How the letters, some dating to 1973, wound up bobbing in the surf is a mystery.
“There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach,” said Bill Lacovara, a Ventnor insurance adjuster who was fishing last month with his son when he spotted a flowered plastic shopping bag and waded out to retrieve it. “This is just a hint of what really happens. How many letters like this all over the world aren’t being opened or answered?”
No doubt, each one represents countless others, with universal stories of loneliness, fear, hope, and need…all somehow representing a petition.
Many of the letters were addressed to the Rev. Grady Cooper, though many more simply said “Altar.” According to the text of several of them, they were intended to be placed on a church’s altar and prayed over by the minister, the congregation or both.
Some were neatly written in script on white-lined paper, others in a feverish scrawl on tattered scraps of parchment or note cards. Many were crinkled from being in the water and then dried out after Lacovara fished them out of the sea…
Many more were written by anguished spouses, children or widows, pouring out their hearts to God, asking for help with relatives who were using drugs, gambling or cheating on them. One man wrote from prison, saying he was innocent and wanted to be back home with his family…
A teenager poured out her heart on yellow-lined paper in the curlicue pencil handwriting of a schoolgirl, begging God to forgive her and asking for a second chance.
“Lord, I know that I have had an abortion and I killed one of your angels,” she wrote. “There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the mistake I made.”
Lacovera tried to figure out how to reconcile this amazing outpouring of people’s lives with the the fact that they were never delivered.
“I guess rather than just throw them in the garbage, maybe they thought they’d set them out to sea to bless these people,” he said.
And now they are blessing many more.
