Hosea's Heart — Linda Wood Rondeau

How much should a wronged husband forgive? This time, Aubrey Beaumont's wife has left for good. Though a single dad with three children to raise, Aubrey diligently searches for his drug-addicted, runaway wife. Fifteen years later, he has relocated from Vermont to Silver Spring where he serves as a respected minister and chaplain. He is caught in a quandary when he is called to a community hospital to counsel a terminally ill patient and comes face-to-face with his long-lost wife. After leaving her family, Joanna Beaumont becomes a madame for Washington's rich and powerful. With God's forgiveness, she desires to find purpose in her final days and negotiates a plea bargain for testimony against her drug-lord lover. She accepts God's judgment and expects no healing miracle. Her salvation and reunion with Aubrey is grace enough. While Aubrey can understand his wife's drug addiction, her romantic liaison with a vicious criminal seems beyond his human capacity to forgive. Does God expect him to rescue her from the bowels of degradation like the biblical Hosea? Why did God bring her back to him only to watch her die?