Letters From A Wounded Heart

A collection of 40 letters to God from a poet/writer seeking communion with and healing from the divine in the midst of the woundedness encountered in everyday living.

As humans we form relationships with others, this comes as natural as learning to walk for most people. You struggle at first but eventually you're running. The problem we have is not forming relationships but trying to maintain these relationships past the getting to know each other stage, a stage that is never ending. The hardest thing for people to do in life is to live to please someone else. Because, we are all so different in every aspect of who we are, it is almost impossible to please most people that we are in relationships with. Relationships are something we take for granted. For instance, just because you love someone doesn't make it automatic. Relationships are something we must work at to become successful. We spend years preparing ourselves to achieve and maintain a satisfying career, but we do very little when it comes to maintaining a loving relationship. Some things we can learn naturally, being in a long-term relationship is not one of them. I hope by you reading these few words it will encourage you to stop taking your relationship, the people you love, their feelings for you, and your feelings for them, for granted. What you put in your relationship is what you will get out of it.

Inspired by William Shakespeare's "The Sonnets - Poems of Love," 'Letters' is a modern day collection of poems about heartache. As the author believes that pain and despair are inevitable in experiencing true love, twelve letters have been written to worthy recipients of pure, unadulterated passion, fondness, desire, yearning, and infatuation. Each feeling, synonymous with love, is of so much value to her, it bled onto paper and therefore permanently marked her heart. Perhaps it might mark yours, too. For we are all givers of love, love we are not capable of taking back, but perhaps may bury in a letter, a letter not only of words, but of time, feelings, energy, gashes, wounds, hope, and lack thereof. These letters are a sealing of both memories and a lifetime of love. These are letters from a broken heart...

Letters for and from a Broken Heart is a collection of poems capturing a man's journey to link his mind and heart as he pleads and surrenders to God. He writes and receives bottled letters as he follows the twisted, unknown path of the river and plunges toward the jagged, sharp heart of stone.

My Wounded Heart tells the heart-breaking story of a gifted Jewish doctor, the mother of five children, who, after being divorced by her Aryan husband, is arrested on an absurd charge and sent to a corrective labour camp in 1942. Lilli was a prolific letter writer and miraculously almost all her letters to her children and friends, together with a huge number of their letters to her (smuggled out of the camp at Breitenau before she was sent to Auschwitz), survived the Second World War and only came to light on the death of her son in 1998. In the letters and in Martin Doerry's superb commentary, we see the deterioration of a whole country through the eyes of an ordinary family driven asunder by pressure from the Nazi regime. We see Lilli's initial optimism and love of her husband begin to crack. We see her trying to support and run the family home from Breitenau camp, but relying totally on her twelve-year-old daughter, Ilse. And we see the difficulties for the children of living with their father's mistress, now his wife, after a bombing raid destroys the family home. And perhaps most moving of all, we see Ilse's heroic attempts to meet her mother, even though it means going into the labour camp itself, and Lilli's courage in the face of her inevitable end.

What would it take for you to stop loving God? At some point thinking Christians must wrestle with the question, "If God loves me, why did He let this happen?" In Wounded Head, Wounded Heart the question is not explored theologically, but experientially. As the story opens, Robb's mom is questioning God because of the poverty they have endured since returning from the mission field. Then Robb, age seventeen, is in a car accident which leaves him in a deep coma with multiple injuries. Who is this God? God claims to protect us, but bad things happen. God claims he is just, but life is unfair. God claims to love us, but life hurts. Robb's mom cannot deny her experiences, yet she knows the Bible is true. She cannot reconcile what she knows of Scripture to what she has seen and experienced. So, she begins her quest for a way to harmonize God's claims and her reality. This emotionally intense and thought-provoking story will challenge readers to consider how their own experiences have impacted their faith. Wounded Head, Wounded Heart is a story of hope for everyone who has ever asked, "God, why?"

Madame,—I entreat you to completely separate the author from the man, and to believe in the sincerity of the sentiments which I have vaguely expressed in the correspondence you have obliged me to hold with you. In spite of the perpetual caution which some friends give me against certain letters like those which I have had the honour to receive from you, I have been keenly touched by a tone that levity cannot counterfeit. If you will deign to excuse the folly of a young heart and a wholly virgin imagination, I will own that you have been to me the object of the sweetest dreams; in spite of my hard work I have found myself more than once galloping through space to hover above the unknown country where you, also unknown, live alone of your race. I have taken pleasure in comprehending you among the remains almost always unfortunate of a dispersed people, a people scattered thinly over the earth, exiled perhaps from heaven, but of whom each being has language and sentiments to him peculiar and unlike those of other men,—delicacy, choiceness of soul, chasteness of feeling, tenderness of heart, purer, sweeter, gentler than in the best of other created beings. There is something saintly in even their enthusiasms, and calm in their ardour. These poor exiles have all, in their voices, their words, their ideas, something, I know not what, which distinguishes them from others, which serves to bind them to one another in spite of distance, lands, and language; a word, a phrase, the very sentiment exhaled in a look are like a rallying call which they obey; and, compatriots of a hidden land whose charms are reproduced in their memories, they recognize and love one another in the name of that country toward which they stretch their arms. Poesy, music, and religion are their three divinities, their favourite loves; and all these passions awake in their hearts sensations that are equally powerful.