Books by Dwayne Cole

Faith Poetry is more about how to live in this world than it is about how to live in an afterlife.All we have is this moment The here and now. The present gift The world is the poem.Nature poetry is the spiritual expression of who we are. Nature sings the song of our faith, our being The language of our soul.Dwayne Cole and his wife, Beth met while they were both in seminary studying for the Master of Divinity degree. Dwayne has also earned a Master of Theology and a Ph.D. in New Testament with a major in Greek. They have an adult son and daughter and two teenage grandchildren.They came to Alaska in 2011 to be with family. Their daughter and son in law came to start their medical practice and needed help with their two children.

In God and Evil, I have used poetic imagery as a way of uniting science, philosophy, theology, and the arts. During fifty years of Christian ministry, I struggled with the deep mystery of God and evil. I not only had to deal with my personal struggles with suffering and death, but also the needs of thousands of church members who looked to me for help. This book, God and Evil: An Ode to Kindness, is a summation of my pastoral advice on how to cope with evil without being broken in the process. The faith premise is that God is in the world and for the world, in us and for us, luring us toward goodness and kindness so that we may become our very best self.

The vision inspired by this book can change our world into one community knitted together by kind words and gentle actions. This hope filled vision taps into the healing energy of kindness found in most religions and makes it the prism through which we understand God, the world, and all things. Following this path of relational kindness, leads me to be at home in any religion teaching and practicing kindness-Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, and all religious groups teaching kindness. Kindness is the language known around the world. Wrapped in God's kindness, we are all one-The One in many and the many in One.

Jesus' gentle life and tender teachings actualize God's aims and purposes for all creation. Jesus learned to incorporate each moment of his life in an experience of God's life and his growing consciousness of God's presence linked the past action of God in the prophets like Isaiah and Hosea to his ministry that created a vision for the future. That union was a fusion of human and divine love that enables us to look back to beginning times and glance forward to end times. Thus in Jesus' tender words and gentle actions we see and feel God acting. Past, present, and future become a unity bound up in loving kindness. Love is a uniting force. Staying power resides in these tender teachings. Simple acts of loving kindness to our self, our family, and to all living things are the most hopeful and powerful transformers in the world and may very well be our greatest hope of survival when relationships between countries have reached dangerous levels of disharmony and environmental changes threaten the future of our planet.

This book is a poetic memoir of the Robert Lewis and Jessie Pearl Cole family. Saint Augustine said that God loves each one of us as though each is the only one to love. My parents never read Augustine's Confessions, but they lived the truth of this faith statement. They daily loved each of their thirteen children as though each was the only one to love. This book is dedicated to them.