21 Letters to God: A Heart's Cry

Overview

21 Letters to God: A Heart’s Cry is a deeply vulnerable spiritual memoir written in the form of personal letters between the author and God. Each letter exposes the raw, unfiltered dialogue between a wounded soul and the divine, blending confession, confrontation, and communion. Tiffany J. Pough (SoFree) invites readers into an intimate journey of reckoning with faith, trauma, abandonment, and redemption—where belief and brokenness coexist.

The work is both devotional and testimonial, blurring the line between prayer and poetry. Rather than offering neatly packaged resolutions, it offers truth as therapy—letters written in blood, not ink.

Structure

The book is divided into four movements, each representing a stage in spiritual and emotional evolution:

1. The Fracture – Where identity buckles and survival strategies fail.
   These opening letters wrestle with issues of self-image, insecurity, procrastination, and inconsistency. Pough bares her struggles with identity and self-worth, capturing the internal war between the mirror and the soul. God’s responses serve as gentle yet firm corrections, reminding her that she is seen, loved, and divinely made despite her self-doubt.
2. The Collapse – Where abandonment, grief, and rage refuse resolution.
   The middle section plunges into darker emotional terrain—abandonment, grief, anger, regret, loneliness, and depression. These letters reveal what happens when faith meets despair. Here, God’s responses are both confrontational and compassionate, illustrating a divine presence that does not erase pain but enters it, holding the reader through their unraveling.
3. The Confrontation – Where longing, betrayal, and divine silence collide.
   Pough wrestles with trust, anxiety, betrayal, parenting, and addiction. The tone is raw and searching, often bordering on rebellion. Yet even in these fiery dialogues, grace meets fury. This section reveals a God who doesn’t flee from the storm but speaks within it.
4. The Surrender – Where control is dismantled and divine love is redefined.
   The closing letters shift from resistance to release. Themes of perfection, self-love, pride, letting go, and forgiveness emerge. These final conversations mark a spiritual turning point—accepting divine love not as a reward for obedience, but as a refuge for the broken. Healing is no longer an event, but an ongoing invitation.

Tone and Style

Pough writes with a poetic, confessional intensity reminiscent of journals written at midnight—where theology and trauma meet in the same breath. The narrative voice alternates between Letters from the Author to God and Responses from God, giving readers both human vulnerability and divine reassurance.

Each letter concludes with:

• A Reflection that expands on the spiritual lesson.
• Questions to Reflect On for the reader’s own healing.
• A closing quote from influential Black thinkers, writers, or artists (e.g., Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Benjamin E. Mays, Viola Davis), connecting personal faith to cultural resilience.

Themes

• Faith and Authenticity: Rejecting performative religion to embrace honest, messy spirituality.
• Abandonment and Divine Presence: Confronting feelings of being unseen—even by God—and discovering that presence often feels like silence.
• Identity and Self-Worth: Learning to see oneself as God’s reflection, not the world’s rejection.
• Healing through Confrontation: Facing pain without spiritual platitudes; finding holiness in the hard questions.
• Black Womanhood and Survival: The narrative carries the cultural and emotional weight of being a Black woman navigating faith, family, and generational trauma.
• Grace and Restoration: Each letter testifies that grace is not earned—it’s endured, experienced, and eventually embraced.

Dedication and Legacy

The book is dedicated to Pough’s daughters—Loren, Kennedy, and Peyton—as her living legacy and spiritual inheritance, and to the loving memory of Reverend Willie “Bill” Coleman and Jeanette Theresa Coleman. Through these dedications, the work becomes generational—a love letter to her family and an offering of truth for those still fighting to believe.

Conclusion

21 Letters to God: A Heart’s Cry is not a manual for healing—it’s a mirror for those still bleeding. It’s for anyone who has questioned their faith, wrestled with silence, or felt too broken to pray. Tiffany J. Pough transforms her pain into prose, showing that God’s love doesn’t demand perfection—it simply requires presence. The result is a devotional that reads like a diary, a confession, and ultimately, a resurrection.