“Before Dawn: A Time of Testing, Humbling, Suffering, and Sacrificing” by Ralph Riley Cooley is now available for purchase 

Author Reputation Press is honored to publish “Before Dawn: A Time of Testing, Humbling, Suffering, and Sacrificing” by Ralph Riley Cooley. The book is now available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and the ARP website.

Ralph Riley Cooley is a retired US Air Force airman. He was honorably discharged on January 1, 1986. He started his own business in 1988. He was a subcontractor, helping build roads and highways using heavy trucks and heavy equipment. This was the most enjoyable job, and it had the potential to be the most lucrative job he had ever known. Due to an injury and a work stoppage on this type of work in his area, he had to look for something else.

Ralph has a strong belief system. He believes in the holy trinity: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He believes in the family because the family knows you better than anyone else. He believes that choosing right over wrong leads to a more profound life. He has never been incarcerated, and neither has he ever put an illegal drug in his body. He wholeheartedly believes a good education for all, with diversity, can lift the standards of a family, a city, or a nation.

Ralph Riley also believes in the old gospel song, Where He Leads Me I Will Follow. When God asked Ralph to follow Him to work in a nursing home and a mental hospital, behind the doors of misery, pain, and sadness, Ralph said he almost questioned God’s authority. Yet he obeyed. Ralph Riley believes God gave him the strength and consciousness to aid and comfort the acute and chronically mentally ill through the gifts of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control. Of these, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control were his closest allies. Many prayers for the patients, staff, and himself were always on his schedule.

Having been blessed to be physically strong and mentally alert all his life, it was time for Ralph Riley to give back. He did just that. He gave back fifteen of his retirement years. Now, all that’s left to give are his prayers and these few words:

“Take care of your mental health. By all means, take care of your mental health. It’s an unparalleled gift from God (see chapter 25). Ralph Riley believes this is God’s mandate for all of us.

“Before Dawn: A Time of Testing, Humbling, Suffering, and Sacrificing” introduces the event when he cried so loudly. He cried so sadly. During his birth, his mother almost lost her life trying to save him. There were so many complications that some people said he would have been better off if he had been stillborn rather than to have lived. He was an ugly baby. He cried a lot when strangers held him. They outwardly scorned him, and they secretly abused him.

A big brown medicine ball worn over his bulging naval caused him to be cut off from his little friends much of the time. He grew up in a kind, loving, and faithful sharecropper family. But he saw suffering in his family early. When he was just six years old, his family was thrust out of their home and cast into the wilderness. This happened because his parents tried to make progress. They tried to buy some land and break the sharecroppers’ curse on the family. The wilderness living experience was tough. His mother’s faithful prayers helped the family cope with the barren land, the creeks, the woods, the wild animals, and the things that crawled on the earth. Meeting Miss Dolly, a scary but sad woman, and seeing his brother dangling over fast-moving water after falling off the footlog were terrifying experiences for him.

Could he pull himself up with his bootstraps? Well, he started a self-assessment program in seventh grade. He left home at age sixteen, hitchhiking down a long, lonely, dangerous highway. He was searching for a schoolhouse.

“Before Dawn: A Time of Testing, Humbling, Suffering, and Sacrificing” by Ralph Riley Cooley is now available for purchase on Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y7utbv85.