Post by Bill MThere are close to a thousand different God beliefs. Millions of people base
their lives on their different God beliefs.
If there is any real God that created the Universe and everything in it, why
does he not
announce directly from his heaven that he is the REAL God and all the others
are fakes?
We're waiting!
Keep waiting. God is in New Jersey and does not bother even to open his
mail. :-)
http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/11/02/unanswered.prayers.ap
Letters to God found dumped off New Jersey coast
POSTED: 2215 GMT (0615 HKT), November 2, 2006
ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey (AP) -- 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?"
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.
A dog-eared business card inside one of the letters identified Cooper
as associate pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Jersey City.
A woman who answered the phone at the church office confirmed Cooper
once was a minister there, and had died nearly two years ago. The
current pastor did not return several calls from The Associated Press
over the past few days.
Other documents in the bag, including bank statements and canceled
checks, also listed Cooper's name and an address for him in Jersey
City. A death certificate issued in 2004 for a Grady Cooper lists the
same address as those on the bank documents and some of the letters.
His wife, Frances, whose name also showed up on some of the letters at
the same address, died in 2000, according to Hudson County records.
No one answered the door last week at the address where Cooper once
lived, and a neighbor said he did not recall anyone by that name.
Attempts to locate Cooper's relatives were unsuccessful.
Lacovara speculated that someone cleaning out Cooper's home found the
letters and threw them on the beach in Atlantic City, about 100 miles
from Jersey City.
"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. "So they
made a trip to Atlantic City, maybe went to a casino, and put the
letters in the water."
The letters, wrapped in several smaller brown paper bags inside the
larger plastic bag, did not appear to have been in the water too long,
Lacovara said, though about half were too badly damaged to be legible.
Humorous and heartbreaking
He opened a few with his son, Rocky, on the beach. The first few were
humorous.
"I'm still praying to hit the lottery twice: first the $50,000," one
man wrote. "Than after some changes have taken place let me hit the
millionaire."
Another asked God to make a certain someone "leave me alone and stay
off my back," while still another asks God to calm a woman who "call
the Internal Revenue on me."
One woman complained that her husband always talks about sex, and
another writer anonymously dropped a dime to God on someone cheating on
his wife, complete with dates, times and locations.
But those, Lacovara soon found, were the exception.
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 woman wrote that her boyfriend was now closing
the door to her daughter's bedroom each night when it used to stay
open, and wondered why.
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."
One unwed mother wrote that her baby was due in four weeks, and asked
God to make the father fall in love with her and marry her so the child
would have a father.
Lacovara said he is sad that most of the writers never had their
letters read. But he hopes to change that soon: He is putting the
collection up for sale on eBay.