What happens to our prayers after we send them out? For 300 people living in the New Jersey area, the answer to that question is not very encouraging.

Bill Lacovara was fishing on the coast of Atlantic City, New Jersey, when he spotted a plastic bag floating in the water. Inside, he found about 300 prayers that had been mailed to a local pastor—most of which were unopened. The pastor had died two years earlier, and authorities speculated that the letters had been dumped as garbage after his house was cleaned out.

Some of the prayers were rather frivolous. For example, one man asked that God help him win the lottery…twice: "I'm still praying to hit the lottery twice," he wrote. "First the $50,000—then, after some changes have taken place, let me hit the millionaire."

But many of the letters were heartbreaking. They came from anguished spouses, children, and widows, all crying out to God. Some prayed for relatives who were using drugs, gambling, or cheating on them. One man wrote from prison, saying that he was innocent and wanted to be back home with his family. A teenager poured out her heart on yellow-lined paper in the curlicue 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."

Lacovara was saddened that so many prayers had been tossed away, unheeded. "How many letters like this all over the world aren't being opened or answered?" he wondered. "There are hundreds of lives here, a lot of struggle, washed up on the beach."