Wheaton, Illinois · Early 1942
A train went by before breakfast — not yours, but I listened until it was gone.
— Eleanor, from the first letter
Letters of Providence is the correspondence of two people the war is pulling apart — Eleanor, an Army nurse, and Eli, a reconnaissance pilot. You read the letters they send. Twenty-four of them, arriving one at a time, the way letters do.
Leave your address
The letters go out to the people on this list first.
Your address is on the list. The first letter will find you.
Each letter arrives as a letter — on period paper, in its own envelope, with the small things that traveled beside it: a rail ticket, a pressed flower, a recipe written on the back of a supply slip.
They come from a bedroom in Wheaton, a ward in Oxford, a road above Ravello, and a lake up north — wherever the war has carried the two of them by the month you're reading.
It was written for readers who are done performing their faith and would rather be met than impressed. It does not preach. It tells the truth and trusts you to meet it.
It does not explain the suffering. It only refuses to abandon the address.
Leave your address
Your address is on the list. The first letter will find you.