Do you feel as though your marriage has been hit by a storm? Right now, during the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, many people are feeling like that. We’re all having to deal with new and unexpected things that challenge us in ways we’ve never experienced.
Even without the looming threat of the coronavirus, that scenario is exactly what drove authors and speakers Gene and Carol Kent, along with Dave and Cindy Lambert, to write their new book, Staying Power. Longtime friends, the two couples spent some time discussing “things that have hit us from outside our marriage,” Carol tells host Marti Pieper on the Hope for Your Marriage series on the Charisma News podcast.
And the Kents know about those forces. More than 20 years ago, their only child, Jason, then a recent graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, made a terrible choice and ended up in prison serving a life sentence for first-degree murder.
“There are lots of books about the wrong choices we make in marriage, like adultery or pornography. Those are things we bring upon ourselves,” Carol explains. “But we wanted to write a book for couples who are pretty happy, who might have an autistic child, in our case, a child who has a prison sentence. … And Dave and Cindy were raising a grandchild because their son was drug-addicted. [Staying Power] deals with those things—it might be a financial crisis or caring for aging parents, but they’re things that come from outside our marriage, and then the enemy comes in and tries to ruin our relationship. And we want to help marriages grow strong.”
Gene adds, “When we were in the very beginning of our journey with our son, I started reading the Bible over again … and I came to Genesis 28. And that’s just a great little passage where it talks about Jacob, who’s having the dream where he sees the ladder going into heaven. And he realizes that there’s a spiritual battle going on, on earth. … There’s one little verse, verse 16 of Genesis 28, that says, ‘surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it.’
“And I think that’s got to be true for all of us as we look at COVID-19 and try to figure out, ‘OK, God, we don’t know what’s happening. But You still are in this place,'” Gene says. “‘You are walking along this journey beside all of us. And we just ask You to empower us as believers to be a light to the people who don’t have any light, who are pretty fearful right now.'”
Charisma Media Staff