Letters to God Found Dumped in Water

[mawilson 2,133]

By WAYNE PARRY, AP

ATLANTIC CITY, New Jersey (Nov. 3) - 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.

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."

One woman complained that her husband always talks about sex, and another writer

anonymously to God about 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 now,

from coast to coast, people are lining up to answer the prayers.

Lacovara originally put the collection up for sale on eBay, but he canceled the Internet

auction for them on Friday after seeing how sincere the interest was among the faithful

who want to make sure that someone finally hears each request.

"The religious folks are coming out of the woodwork," said Lacovara. "It's been non-stop:

a pastor in Texas, one from Colorado, another from somewhere in the midwest. One

guy said he wants to write a play about this."

So now he's fielding offers from churches across the nation who have expressed

interest in obtaining the letters so their own congregations can pray over them. He plans

to hand over all the letters for free to one of them.

In a letter, a woman asks God for a husband and father for her child. It is one of about 300 letters to God found in the Atlantic City, N.J., surf.

Bill Lacovara and his son, Rocky, found the letters. Many are addressed to Rev. Grady Cooper, who was a pastor at a Jersey City, N.J., church. He died two years ago.

Some of the letters date as far back as the late 1970s, and most remained unopened. Lacovara plans to sell them on eBay. Source: AP

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

Atlantic City is a bleak place for people's hopes. Very weird.