Issue No.8

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

Written by Ruth Ann Decker, found tucked beneath the hymnals in the third pew of Grace Fellowship Baptist Church, Millhaven, Tennessee. The letter is undated. Based on the deacon’s account, it was likely written in the pre-dawn hours of a Thursday morning in October, 1974.

O Dear Lord,

I don’t know whose church this is but the side door was open and I have been walking since a little past midnight and my feet won’t carry me any further tonight so I hope You’ll forgive me for sitting in one of Your pews without being invited. I found this notepad in the little room off the side and a pencil on the windowsill and I thought maybe if I wrote some of this down it might get lighter. I don’t know if that’s true. I’ve never tried it before.

My name is Ruth Ann. I am thirty four years old and I have been in the same county my entire life except for right now, tonight, which is the first time I have ever been somewhere that Gerald doesn’t know about. I want you to understand what that feels like after eleven years. I sat in your third pew for twenty minutes just breathing before I could write a single word. Just breathing the air in a room where nobody knows where I am. I need to tell You some things. I need to tell somebody and You’re all that’s here.

Gerald hit me for the first time six weeks after the wedding. I want you to know that because people always want to know why you didn’t leave sooner and I want the record to be clear that I was barely unpacked when I found out what I had married. I was nineteen years old and my daddy had already told me I was Gerald’s problem now so there was no going back to that house and I had $11 in my pocketbook and I didn’t know a single thing about how to be alone in the world. So I stayed. And then I stayed again. And I kept staying the way you keep staying when leaving feels more dangerous than the thing you’re leaving from. I want to ask You something and I need You to be honest with me the way nobody in my life has ever been honest with me. Why did You make me?

I am not asking that to be dramatic or because I want You to feel bad. I am asking because I have looked at my life from every direction I know how to look at it and I cannot find the answer. My mama gave me away to my daddy when I was four because I was inconvenient to her new situation. My daddy kept me around because I was useful for cooking and cleaning and then gave me away to Gerald because I was inconvenient to his new situation. Gerald has had me for eleven years and in those eleven years I have cooked approximately four thousand meals and cleaned this house until my hands cracked and bled and ironed his shirts and raised his children and I have been hit so many times I have stopped counting and I have never once felt like a person that anyone made on purpose.

I have two boys. Danny is nine and Wayne is seven. Gerald’s mama has them tonight and that’s the only reason I was able to go because I could not have left if they were in the house. I need You to know I did not leave my children. I left to stay alive long enough to maybe get them back some day if it’s even possible. There is a difference and it matters to me that You understand that difference even if nobody else ever does. He came home last Thursday and something was wrong at work and I had burned the cornbread and he put me through the kitchen wall. Not against it. Through it. I lay on the kitchen floor looking up at the hole where the plaster was and I thought, this is the one. Not because it hurt worse than the others, though it did, but because of the way he looked at me afterward. Like he was calculating something. Like he was trying to decide how much trouble it would be. I have seen that look before on men’s faces in other situations and I know what it means and I know that if I am still in that house the next time something is wrong at work I will not get up off the floor.

So I packed what fit in a paper bag and I left at midnight and I have been walking since and I do not know where I am going. I went to the police station two years ago after a bad one and the officer who talked to me told me that what happens between a husband and wife is a private matter and if I pressed it Gerald would lose his job at the plant and then where would we be. I have not been back to the police since. I have nowhere to go. I don’t know if there is anywhere for women like me to go. I don’t think there is. I think we are just supposed to disappear quietly so nobody has to be uncomfortable about it. I need to ask You the other thing now.

I know that suicide is a sin. I have sat in enough church pews in my life to know that much even if nobody ever treated me like the rest of it applied to me. So I am not going to do that. But Lord, I am so tired. I am so tired in a place that sleep doesn’t fix. I have been tired since I was four years old and my mama drove away and I have not stopped being tired since and I do not know how much tired a person can hold before they just stop. I am asking You — if it is not too much trouble — if maybe You could just call me home. Not by my hand. By Yours. Because I don’t think I am strong enough to keep living this life and I don’t know how to find a different one and maybe my boys would be better off without me. I am sitting in this church pew in the dark in a town I don’t know and I have $7 and some change in my pocketbook and I am thirty four years old and I have never once in my life had something that was mine. Not a house. Not a name I chose. Not a single day I decided myself.

I know You probably have more important things to tend to. I know there are people in the world with real problems and I know a burned cornbread wife in Tennessee is not exactly what You put the stars in the sky for. But I am sitting in Your house. And I don’t know where else to go.

Ruth Ann

P.S. — Your church is very clean. Whoever takes care of it does a good job. I polished the little brass offering plate on my way in because it had a smudge on it and I didn’t have anything else to offer. I hope that’s all right.

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Issue No.7

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

Written by Wei Liang, railroad work camp, Sierra Nevada Mountains, California. May 9th, 1869. The night before the Golden Spike ceremony.

O Tian. O Heaven. O Whatever Great Power Listens To A Man Like Me.

I do not know if You are the God the white missionaries speak of or the Heaven my grandfather spoke of or something older and larger than either. I have decided it does not matter tonight. Tonight I am simply a man who needs somewhere to put what is in him and the sky is very large above these mountains and something up there must be listening because I have seen too much beauty in this world to believe it made itself.

My name is Wei Liang. I am from Taishan County in Guangdong Province and I am thirty four years old and I have been in these mountains for three years and four months. I came because my cousin Ah-Sing wrote home that there was work in Gold Mountain — that is what we call this country, Gold Mountain, which I have decided is what hopeful people name a place before they arrive and something different is what they name it after. I have not found gold. I have found granite. I have found black powder and nitroglycerin and the inside of more tunnels than I can count and the cold that comes off these mountains at night that is a different kind of cold than anything Guangdong ever prepared me for. I want to tell You what we built. I want to tell You because I do not think anyone else is going to tell it properly and I am afraid that if I don’t say it out loud to something it will just disappear into the mountain air and be forgotten.

We came here — fifteen thousand of us at the most, from the same province mostly, speaking the same dialects, eating the rice and dried oysters and bamboo shoots we bought with our own wages because the company would not feed us the way they fed the white workers — we came here and we moved mountains. That is not a manner of speaking. That is what we did. We drilled through granite with hand tools. We lowered ourselves down the faces of cliffs in wicker baskets to place the black powder charges and then we pulled each other up fast before the mountain came apart and sometimes we did not pull fast enough. We worked through two winters that the old timers said were the worst in memory, living in tunnels we dug under thirty feet of snow because there was nowhere else to go, hearing the avalanches move over our heads in the dark, losing men we could not always find again until the spring thaw.

We built Summit Tunnel through a mountain so hard the foremen said it could not be done and we did it anyway with hand drills and black powder one inch at a time for eighteen months. We laid iron across the Nevada desert in temperatures that made the air itself feel like something hostile. We set the record in April — ten miles of track in a single day — because the company foremen made a bet with the Union Pacific men and needed us to win it for them. Ten miles of iron in one day. The newspapers wrote about that record. They did not write our names. Tomorrow they will drive the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit and the men in the tall hats and the good coats will make their speeches and drink their champagne and the telegraph will send the word across the whole country and people will celebrate from one coast to the other coast that the railroad is finished. The railroad that we built. That these hands built. These fifteen thousand pairs of hands that are not in the photograph they took and will not be at the ceremony tomorrow and whose names are not recorded anywhere that I have been able to find.

I am not in the photograph. I want You to hear that. Not because I am angry — though I will tell You honestly that there is something in me tonight that is not entirely peaceful — but because I think it is important that someone who is listening knows that Wei Liang of Taishan County was here. That Ah-Sing was here. That Chen Bao and Liu Wei and the one we called Little Mountain because he was so small and so strong — that they were here. That we laid our hands on this iron and pushed it over these mountains and across this desert and some of us left our bones in the granite and the snow and the Nevada sand and none of that is in the ceremony tomorrow.

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Issue No. 6

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

Spoken by Solomon Henry, Natchez, Mississippi, 1866. Written down by Miz Clara Beauford, who learned her letters at the Freedmen’s Bureau school.

O Dear Lord,

I am askin Miz Clara to write this down for me cause I never got to learn my letters, they wouldn’t allow it, and I got things I need to say to You that are too big to just say out loud and have em float away into the air like they don’t matter. Miz Clara says You read everything and I am counting on that being true.

My name is Solomon Henry. I took that last name Henry myself just this past year because I always admired a man named Henry who drove the wagon on the plantation and never let nobody see him afraid even when he had every reason to be. I am thirty one years old and I was born into slavery on the Whitfield plantation outside Natchez and I have never known one single day of freedom until they told us last year that Mr. Lincoln’s paper made us free. I want You to know Lord that when they told us I got down on my knees right there in the dirt and I thanked You. I want You to remember that I did that. Because what I got to say now is hard and I need You to know it comes from a man who got down in the dirt and thanked You first. They told us we was free.

And Lord I believed it. I believed it the way a man who has been in a dark room his whole life believes in the sun the first time somebody opens the door — with his whole body, with every part of him, almost too much to bear all at once. Free. I said that word to myself so many times them first weeks that it stopped sounding like a word and started sounding like a song. Free. Solomon Henry is free. But Lord. I am going to tell You what free looks like from where I am standing in Natchez Mississippi in the year of eighteen and sixty six and I need You to tell me if this is what You had in mind because it does not look like what I pictured.

Free looks like this. It looks like me walking down the same road I always walked and the same white men who used to own the right to everything about me looking at me like I have done something wrong by being on that road. It looks like me going to ask about work — honest work, Lord, I want to work, I have always worked, work is not the problem — and being told there ain’t nothing available and then watching a white man get hired for that same nothing not one hour later. It looks like Black Codes that say I got to have a labor contract or I can be arrested for vagrancy which as best I can figure means that the law has found a way to make freedom look almost exactly like what came before it except now they call it something different.

It looks like being afraid to walk to the store after dark. It looks like keeping my eyes down when certain men ride by on horses even though I am a free man and I got as much right to look up as anybody. It looks like watching what happened to James Fuller two counties over just because he tried to vote, which they told us we could do now, which apparently somebody forgot to tell the men who did what they did to James Fuller. Lord I am not a man who asks for much. I never have been. I have watched my whole life what happens to men who ask for too much and I learned early to keep my asking small and quiet. But I got to ask You this one thing straight out because I cannot make sense of it no matter how many ways I turn it around in my mind. These men. These white men who do these things. They go to church Lord. They go to church every Sunday, some of them to the same church I was made to sit in the back of for thirty years, and they sing the same hymns and read the same Bible and bow their heads to the same God. And then they come out of that church and they look at me like I am something less than what You made me. Like the image of God that Reverend Chambers says is in every man — every man, Lord, he says every man — somehow didn’t make it all the way to me. How does that work?

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Issue No. 5

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

From the desk of Miz Darlene Faye Pickette, Sunflower County, Mississippi. Summer, 1943.

O Dear Lord,

Please, please, PLEASE give me strength, ‘cause I’m ‘bout to beat this boy seven ways from Sunday!!

Now Lord I know that ain’t no way to start a letter to You and I do apologize for my tone but I been holdin’ that in since approximately six-thirty this mornin’ when I come out to the yard to hang the wash and found that Earl Junior — that is my boy, Earl Junior Pickette, age thirteen, who You seen fit to put in my care and who I am startin’ to suspect You sent me as some kinda TEST that I did not study near hard enough for — I found that Earl Junior had took my best washtub, the big tin one with the good handles, and somehow in the night converted it into what he described to me as a “fishin’ vessel” by nailin’ two fence boards to the bottom of it and puttin’ it in the creek and IT SANK, Lord. It sank like a lead sinker on a wet Monday and it took my good washtub down with it and when I asked Earl Junior what in the SAM HILL he was thinkin’ he looked at me real serious and said “Mama, I believe the boards needed to be on the sides.”

I did not beat him, Lord. I want You to note that. I feel that deserves some recognition.

I am a woman alone down here in Sunflower County tryin’ to raise this child without so much as a how-dee-do from his daddy Earl Senior, who as You know and I know and the good Lord above knows ran off three years ago with a woman from Yazoo City and left us with fourteen dollars, half a bag of grits, and a dog that wasn’t even ours to begin with. I have made my peace with Earl Senior bein’ gone — or somethin’ close enough to peace that I don’t think about it more’n four, five times a day — but what I have NOT made my peace with is the fact that he left me to raise this boy without a single male soul in this house to look at Earl Junior and say “boy, you straighten up” in that particular voice that daddies have that actually works, ‘cause Lord I have said “boy you straighten up” approximately four hundred and seventy-two times since January and I can tell You from personal experience that it does not work nearly as well in a woman’s voice, especially when the boy in question is already taller than you and thinks that is HILARIOUS.

Now let me tell You what all Earl Junior has done just in the past two weeks alone, not countin’ the washtub incident which is still too fresh for me to be objective about. He snuck out three nights runnin’ to go lord knows where with those Tatum boys from down the road, who are not good boys Lord, I don’t care whose children they are, those boys got the devil’s own mischief in their eyes and I have told Earl Junior this and he looked at me like I had just said somethin’ in a foreign language. He back-talked Miz Hattie Beaumont at the general store and I near died of shame right there between the flour sacks and the turpentine. He did not do the pigs. He did not do the fence. He did not chop the wood I asked him to chop and when I asked him why he did not chop the wood he said he forgot and when I asked him how a person forgets a whole pile of wood standin’ right there in the yard he said “Mama it ain’t like it was gonna go nowhere” and Lord I am not too proud to tell you I had to go in the house and shut the door ‘fore I said somethin’ unbecoming of a Christian woman.

And the stealin’. Lord I got to tell You about the stealin’ and I got to ask You to please hear me out before You judge because I am not raisin’ a criminal, I truly am not, but I got a call from Mr. Dewey at the five and dime sayin’ Earl Junior walked out with two jaw breakers and a copy of Captain Marvel comics and did not pay for neither one and Lord when I confronted that boy he had the NERVE to tell me he was gonna pay for ‘em next time he had money which is apparently how commerce works in Earl Junior’s mind and I do not know where he got that notion but it was not from me.

I work, Lord. I want You to know that. I work at the cannery four days a week and I take in sewin’ the other three and I am tired down to my actual bones most nights and I come home and there is Earl Junior, not havin’ done a single solitary thing I asked, usually eatin’ the last of somethin’, always with some explanation that makes perfect sense to him and absolutely no sense to me or to any other person on God’s green earth, and I just stand there in my own kitchen Lord and I think — what am I s’posed to do with this child??

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Issue No. 4

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

From the desk of Captain James “Jimmy” Calloway, 91st Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force, RAF Bassingbourn, England. February, 1945.

O Dear Lord,

It is 0300 hours and they woke us forty minutes ago and I am sitting on the edge of my cot in this cold Nissen hut writing this by flashlight while the other boys get themselves together around me. Kowalski is shaving even though nobody makes him and Henderson is reading a letter from his mother for what I figure is probably the fourteenth time since it arrived on Thursday. Reeves is doing what Reeves always does before a mission which is sitting perfectly still with his eyes closed and his lips moving and I have never asked him what he’s saying and I never will because a man’s conversation with You is his own business. In about an hour they’ll feed us breakfast and then we’ll go sit in the briefing room and they’ll pull back the curtain on the map of Europe and we’ll all look immediately for how deep the string goes into Germany and we’ll know from that whether today is a hard day or an easier one. I already know from the weight of this morning that it’s a hard day. Twenty missions and you develop a sense for it the way a farmer develops a sense for weather.

I am not writing to You because I am afraid, Lord. I have made my peace with afraid. Afraid and I are old acquaintances by now — we have shared breakfast together more mornings than I can count and I have learned that afraid is not the enemy. Afraid is just the honest response of a man who understands the situation. What I am writing to You about is something different from afraid. Something that has been sitting in my chest for three nights now and will not be dislodged. We are going to Dresden today. I cannot tell You more than that because I don’t know more than that — the Colonel will pull back the curtain in an hour and it’ll be official — but the word moves through a bomb group the way weather moves through a valley and the word last night was Dresden. An old city, Lord. A beautiful city, I’m told, though I have never seen it and now I suppose I will see it only from twenty five thousand feet through a plexiglass nose. A city of churches and museums and bridges over the Elbe River and people — and there it is, Lord, there is the thing that will not leave my chest alone in the dark. People.

I know what I am supposed to think. I know the briefing I have been given and I know the argument and I believe the argument — I do, Lord, I genuinely do — that every factory we destroy, every rail yard we crater, every ton of fuel we deny the Wehrmacht brings this war to an end faster and brings every man on every side of it home to his family sooner. I believe that. I have to believe that because the alternative is something I cannot afford to carry at twenty five thousand feet responsible for nine other men and a Flying Fortress.

But here is what I cannot make go away entirely, no matter how I arrange the logic of it in my mind in the dark. When the bombardier calls “bombs away” and I feel the plane lift as the weight leaves her belly — somewhere down below that, through twenty five thousand feet of winter air, there are people. Not Wehrmacht. Not SS. People. A woman who looks like my mother hanging washing on a line. A man who looks like my father-in-law reading a newspaper in a doorway. Children who look like Thomas and Claire and baby Ruth who I have not held in fourteen months and whose face I am afraid some mornings I am beginning to remember wrong.

And I have to ask You, Lord — and I ask this as honestly as I know how — is what I am about to do a sin? I was raised to believe that Thou shalt not kill. I was raised by a Methodist mother and a Presbyterian father who between them managed to agree on very little except that commandment, and they raised me with it down to the bone. And yet here I sit in a United States Army Air Forces uniform with a chest full of medals that were given to me specifically for killing, and in about six hours I am going to climb into the sky over Germany and do it again. I am not asking You to stop me. I know my duty and I know my crew and I know what I signed and I would sign it again because I believe — I have to believe — that this war is just and that what we are doing is necessary and that the alternative to us being here is something far darker than the thing we are doing. I have seen what they do, Lord. I have seen the photographs. I know what we are fighting. I know.

I am just asking You to tell me, somewhere in that still small voice of Yours, whether a man can do what I am about to do and still come home to his children with his soul reasonably intact. Whether the forgiveness You are apparently in the business of providing extends to men who drop bombs on cities from the inside of a Flying Fortress at the direction of the United States Army. Whether Thou art, as my mother always insisted, a God of both justice AND mercy, and whether those two things can occupy the same sky at the same time over the same burning city. My crew. Lord, my crew. Kowalski and Henderson and Reeves and the rest of them — ten men in total counting me, every one of them somebody’s son and most of them somebody’s husband or somebody’s father or somebody’s boy who was sitting in high school not three years ago and is now responsible for thirteen fifty caliber machine guns over the heart of Germany. Bring them home. Whatever You decide about the justice of what we are doing up there today — whatever accounting You are keeping and whatever verdict You eventually render — bring my boys home. That is the one thing I am asking that I will not qualify or contextualize or surround with theological uncertainty. Bring. Them. Home.

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Issue No. 3

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

From the desk of Mercy Hayward, Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony. August, 1692.

O Dear Lord,

I write this by the light of a single tallow candle, with the shutters drawn and the door bolted, for I would not have my neighbours observe that I am awake at this hour, nor give them cause to wonder what it is that keeps me from my rest. There is much in Salem Village these days that is observed and reported and set before the magistrates as evidence of one dark thing or another, and I have learned, as we all have learned, that it is wiser to be neither seen nor heard if one can help it. The sparrow that sits still upon the fence is safer than the one that takes to wing and draws the eye. I am afraid, Lord. I confess it plainly because I suspect Thou knowest it already and there is little use in pretending otherwise before One who sees the very marrow of a person’s soul. I am afraid in a way I did not know a body could be afraid — not the ordinary fear of storms or sickness or the hard winter, but a cold and particular fear that lives just beneath my breastbone and will not be dislodged by prayer nor by reason nor by the warmth of my husband’s hand upon my arm in the dark.

Her name is Hannah Marsh and she has been my neighbour and my friend these eleven years past. We have sat together at Meeting. We have physicked each other’s children through fevers and the croup. We have traded preserves in autumn and seed in spring and grief at the graveside without needing to be asked. I have known Hannah Marsh to be a Godfearing woman, a decent wife, a tender mother, and as unlikely a servant of the Devil as any soul I have encountered in my eight and thirty years upon this earth. They came for her on a Tuesday. I watched from behind my curtain, Lord, and I am not proud of it. I watched them lead her past my gate with her hands bound before her and her cap askew and her face the colour of new linen, and I did not open my door. I did not go out to her. I did not call her name. I stood behind my curtain like a coward wrapped in linen and I watched my friend of eleven years be taken down the road toward Salem Town, and I told myself it was because there was nothing I could do. But I know, and Thou knowest, that the true reason I did not open my door was that I was afraid that the opening of it would be seen, and remembered, and used.

They say the afflicted girls named her. They say Ann Putnam and the others fell into their fits and cried out Hannah’s name and that Hannah’s spectre had come upon them in the night and tormented them most grievously. I have watched those girls, Lord — I will not say it in public, I dare not say it in public, but I will say it to Thee because Thou art the only safe confessor left in Salem Village — I have watched those girls and I am not convinced. I am not convinced that what ails them is what they say ails them. But conviction of any kind is a luxury that costs more than I can presently afford, so I keep it here, folded small and silent, where no one but Thou canst see it.

The Magistrates Hathorne and Corwin sit in judgment and they are not gentle men. I have stood in that room and felt the weight of their certainty like a millstone and I have thought — Lord forgive me — that a man who is already certain before the accused has spoken a single word is not a man conducting a trial but a man conducting a ceremony. But the Magistrates are men of authority and their families sit untouched and unaccused on the good side of the courtroom rail, and it seems to me, though I would sooner cut out my tongue than say it aloud, that in Salem Village in this year of 1692 the question of who is accused and who does the accusing has a great deal to do with which family one belongs to and how much land one’s husband holds in the east quarter. I know what Hannah faces. I know it because I know what has already befallen others. Bridget Bishop — whatever her faults, and she had them as we all do — was hanged on Gallows Hill in June and she had said to the court “I am as innocent as the child unborn.” It did not save her. And now I am to believe that Hannah Marsh, who brought me soup when my youngest had the fever and who taught my eldest daughter her letters on winter afternoons by the fire, is a servant of the Devil? I am to believe this because a group of girls said so and fell down upon the floor? I cannot believe it, Lord. And yet I cannot say so. And in the silence between those two things, I am losing myself.

I asked my husband Ezra what we ought to do and he looked at me for a long moment and then he said, very quietly, “We ought to do nothing, Mercy, for there is nothing to be done.” And he is not a cruel man, my Ezra. He is a frightened one. We are all frightened ones. That is what this season has made of us — a village of people who were once neighbours and are now a collection of frightened ones, each watching the others from behind their curtains, each calculating the distance between themselves and the accused, each quietly grateful that it is not their name that has been cried out. Yet. And that word — yet — is the one that wakes me at three in the morning and drives me to this candle and this paper.

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Issue No. 2

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

From the desk of Gary Mitchum, Plainfield, Indiana. March, 2025.

O Dear Lord,

I don’t write letters. Never have. Barely text if I’m being honest, and my daughter has given up trying to teach me how to do the little yellow faces on my phone. But I’ve been sitting in this recliner for three nights now with the TV off and the dog on my feet and something building up inside me that I got nowhere else to put, so here I am writing a letter to God on a yellow legal pad like some kind of a lunatic. My wife Darlene says I should talk to somebody and I told her I was going to and she asked who and I said God and she just shook her head and went to bed. So. Here we are.

I’m 58 years old, Lord. I’ve worked with my hands my whole life, put in 34 years at the same sheet metal shop, raised two kids with Darlene in the same house we bought in 1994, coached little league for eleven years, never once missed a neighbor’s funeral or a friend’s moving day if I could help it. I’m not a perfect man — ask Darlene, she’ll give you a list — but I have always tried to be a decent one. Kept my head down, did my work, minded my business, treated people right. That was the deal I understood. That was how it was supposed to work. And Lord I am here to tell you that deal appears to be OFF.

I don’t know exactly when it happened. Maybe it was gradual and I just didn’t notice until it was too late, like the way you don’t notice a kid growing until suddenly they’re taller than you at Thanksgiving. But I look around at this country right now and I genuinely do not recognize it. And I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. I mean I actually do not recognize it. The United States of America that I grew up in, that my father served in the Navy for, that I have paid taxes in and voted in and believed in for 58 years — I cannot find it anymore. I’ve looked.

What I CAN find, Lord, is this: two men I have called my friends for over twenty years — TWENTY YEARS — who will no longer return my phone calls. Not because I did anything to either one of them. Not because of anything that happened between us personally. But because of POLITICS. Because somehow, somewhere along the line, what a man thinks about who ought to sit in an office in Washington D.C. became more important than twenty years of showing up for each other. More important than the time Rick and I drove four hours in a snowstorm to help his brother move. More important than the fishing trips and the Fantasy Football and the Saturday mornings at the diner that I thought were just — I thought that was just what friends did. I thought that was just life.

I didn’t bring it up. I want You to know that, Lord. I specifically did NOT bring up politics because I KNEW it had gotten bad out there and I didn’t want any part of it. But it found me anyway. It found me in my own driveway when Dave saw what was on the back of my truck and that was apparently all she wrote for twenty two years of friendship. Twenty two years, Lord. Gone. Because of a sticker on a truck.

And I want to be clear because I know You can see the whole picture even when I can’t — I’m not saying I’m right about everything. I’m not even sure what RIGHT looks like anymore and that is the honest truth. What I AM sure about is that BOTH of those men, on completely opposite sides from each other by the way, are each one hundred percent convinced they are right, will not hear a single word to the contrary, and have decided that anyone who doesn’t see it their way isn’t worth keeping around. And Lord I just have to ask — when did that become normal? When did we decide that was acceptable? When did a man’s POLITICS become more important than his CHARACTER?

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Issue No. 1

The letters of O Dear Lord are works of historical fiction. Characters, names, and specific events are fictional and unintentional. Historical settings and periods are used for creative and inspirational purposes only. All scripture references have been verified at BibleGateway.com (KJV).

THE LETTER

From the desk of Mrs. Abigail Mae Hensley, Hardin County, Ohio. Spring, 1862.

O Dear Lord,

I write to Thee with trembling hand and a heart so heavy it doth weigh upon me like the wet clay of our south field after a hard April rain. My husband, Mr. Thomas Hensley, and our eldest boy, Caleb, who shall not yet see his nineteenth year until September next, have gone off to serve in Mr. Lincoln’s Army of the Ohio these past four months, and I confess to Thee, Dear Lord, that I do not know how much longer this poor woman can bear the weight of what has been left behind.

There are two little ones yet at home — Ruth, who is seven, and the boy Samuel, who is but five and already asks each morning at the breakfast table, “Mama, is Papa coming home today?” I smile for him, Lord, I do. But when the candle is extinguished and the children are abed, I weep into my pillow as quiet as I am able, so as not to frighten them. The farm will not tend itself, and the neighbors, bless them, have done what they can. Mr. Aldrich from the next property over split our winter wood before the cold broke, and the women of First Methodist brought a pot of beans and cornbread last Thursday past. Still, the planting season is upon us, and I confess I do not know the first thing about setting the lower field without Thomas beside me. He always said I had no head for farming — and Lord, I fear he was not entirely wrong. I have already made one terrible mess of the seed corn, having left the burlap sacking too near the barn cat’s kittens, and what those creatures did not scatter, the wind finished off most cheerfully. Thomas would have laughed. I did not.

I have taken to rising before the children each morning, not only to see to the animals and the stove, but because those quiet grey minutes before the rooster makes his opinions known are the only ones that belong entirely to me. I use them to read what little I can from Thomas’s Bible — he took his own, so I make do with my mother’s, which has her notes in the margins in her fine small hand. I find it a comfort, though I confess there are mornings I read the same passage three times over and could not tell you a word of it afterward, my mind being so occupied with worry.

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