FamilyLife Blended®

Carol Kent: There is in all of us this sense that we think we're big. I think what loss does, if nothing else, is it is one of God's little reminders of how small we are, not insignificant because we are significant to the Father. We are authentically loved by Him in deep ways that it's hard to fathom. But we're small in the sense of power. We're small in the sense of not being able to control our lives and what happens in our world. That is the thing that we have to wrestle over and over and over again when we look back at the hard things that life throws at us.

Ron Deal: Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I'm Ron Deal. We help blended families and those who love them pursue the relationships that matter most. If you're relatively new to this podcast, you've stumbled on something good, I think. FamilyLife Blended is the largest blended family equipping ministry in the world. We're a division of FamilyLife, and we've produced the leading resources that you can read, watch, listen to, or attend. Bottom line, we want to help. We just want to help. Because we're a donor-supported ministry, much of what we offer that you can read, watch, listen to, or attend is free. Click around, browse familylife.com/blended, and find something that's helpful for you.

We're about a week out from Mother's Day, and we know around here that's a bittersweet day for many of you. Actually, as I think about it, for some stepmoms, it's just bitter. We acknowledge that. Despite the challenges, I also see moms and stepmoms alike remaining dedicated to loving and giving and serving their families and the people in their homes, even in tough circumstances. We want to talk a little bit about that today.

My guest is Carol Kent. She's an international speaker, author, and coach. She encourages women to navigate life's challenges with faith and resilience. She's the founder of the Speak Up Conference, which equips writers and speakers. By the way, I've heard Gayla Grace talk about attending that event and how impactful it was on her. If you know our ministry, you know Gayla Grace is a regular part of that. Carol and her husband, Gene, also founded Speak Up for Hope, which is a nonprofit that benefits inmates and their families. Carol, thank you for joining me today. Thanks for being here.

Carol Kent: Thank you, Ron. I'm honored to be on the air with you today.

Ron Deal: I just have to say to people listening or watching, if Carol's name sounds familiar to you, it should because she was on with Gayla Grace on our Women in Blended Families program in November of 2025. That conversation has received over 320,000 views. Ladies, if you're not following Gayla's monthly Women in Blended Families livestream, you have to check that out. It's on our social media channels. It's also available on YouTube, and you can go back and watch her interview with Carol and everybody else she's interviewed. The show notes will get you connected to that.

We're going to get into your story, Carol, here in a few moments. But I just want to start by celebrating the sheer toughness of the average mom. I think by and large, moms are reliable. I think they're determined. I think they're present as much as they can possibly be. I get the feeling you're one of those kind of moms and that you have seen a lot of this with the women you work with in your ministry. What is your point of view about what you think God has put into women to make them the blessing that they are?

Carol Kent: I think we have great love for our kids. We long for them to do well. We are their cheerleaders, whether it's at an athletic event, a birthday party, or any kind of a special occasion. We want them to succeed. When we're a Christian mom or stepmom, we really want to instill Christian values in them.

I think often we tend to be nurturing and very compassionate. When our heart is in the right place, we're forgiving because kids do a lot of things that they need to be forgiven for. That is exactly right. Any parent or step-parent certainly knows that piece for sure.

When our heart is in the right place, we're trying. I think another description of a good mom would be that she's resilient. She can stand tall when it seems like the kids are not on her side.

Ron Deal: One of the things I appreciate about your work in ministry is that you have written a number of devotionals for women, for moms, for grandmothers. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about them, but I also want to know why you spend so much time writing to women in devotional form. What is it you're trying to communicate to them?

Carol Kent: I think most women need a little help, and I know I certainly did throughout many years of my parenting experience and even to this day. Because I love the Lord and have committed my life to Him, I want help from God's Word.

I've discovered that often we learn a life lesson or principle best if it's wrapped in a story we can never forget. I've written a couple of story-based devotional books for moms and stepmoms. They are both brand new within the last year. One is called *Moments of Grace for Moms*. It's just filled with inspirational stories that each have a biblical truth in them, with a great quote and an action step that talk about a life lesson that a mom has learned.

The brand new one just coming out this spring is called *I Love You, Mom*. It's 52 stories that are filled with laughter and encouragement and God's truth that will help moms learn how to make it even when life isn't turning out perfectly. I'm praying that those will be a spiritual encouragement as well as something that will help moms to internalize biblical truth.

Ron Deal: Resilience, you were talking about earlier. Stories of just captured by that last book, stories that say "I love you, mom." That's every stepmom's dream to hear that come out of the mouth of somebody or step-grandmother's dream to hear that.

The self-giving love that women often have, they still rise to the occasion when life throws them a curve. Talk about that. What is it that helps get you there? What is it that helps get moms to be able to continue to give even when life is stuff?

Carol Kent: Because each of us longs to have our children make the right decisions, we offer a lot of grace. We wind up wanting them to be resilient. So, if we can model resilience, that helps them to learn even if they're not going to learn it from a book. They can watch us and know how to bounce back.

I think that is so key as we are parenting, whether it be our birth children or our stepchildren. In my case, I'm a step-grandparent and wow, have I needed to learn how to bounce back.

Ron Deal: Let's talk about that because you do have a story. Some of our listeners may have heard it in other places where you've shared that in a book that you've written, and you certainly shared that with Gayla Grace in the Women in Blended Families episode that you were on. Life threw you a big curve. Tell us that story.

Carol Kent: We raised an only child. His name is Jason, and he really made us proud. He was president of the National Honor Society and went on missions trips with his youth group. He really set his sights on getting into the United States Naval Academy. I will never forget when he finally received that appointment. We were there in May of 1997 when on national television, all of those midshipmen tossed their hats in the air and we celebrated our young son's accomplishments.

From home, which was in Michigan at the time, he went off to Annapolis, Maryland, and spent four years there. We saw him set his sights on getting into a nuclear engineering program in Orlando, Florida, after his graduation. He was accepted into that program, joined a great church, and they had about 300 young adults studying the Bible. There were women in that Bible study, and Jason got very interested in Bible study.

I think it was a girl, not the Bible, at that point, but he met a very lovely young woman. By the end of that summer, we knew he had fallen madly in love. He called home from a ministry appointment in Denver. On voicemail, our son said, "Mom and Dad, some things are coming down. We have to talk." Ron, it was a moment like that when you wish your child would have added two or three more sentences about what is coming down.

We got a hold of him later. He said, "Mom and Dad, my orders have changed. I have to be at Surface Warfare Officer school in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 8th. April and I are in love and we want to get married next Friday." Ron, our child was asking to marry a previously married woman who had two children next Friday. I was so happy that we were in a hotel that had two telephones because my husband kept that conversation going while I had a little dialogue with God. I said, "Hello Lord, you remember all those years I prayed for my son's future spouse? This is not what I anticipated."

I got back on the phone and I realized that my son was in love. He was definitely getting married and we had a choice. We could either choose to get on board or we could cause a rift that might last a lifetime. We asked them if they would be willing to wait three weeks to be married in our then-hometown of Port Huron, Michigan, with the accountability of family and friends around them. They agreed.

A week and a half later, April came into our lives. It didn't take me long to love this young woman. She had been married at the age of 16 to a man 10 years her senior. She had been through a lot of abuse, and there were multiple allegations of abuse involving six-year-old Chelsea and three-year-old Hannah.

We had a beautiful wedding on a picture-perfect day. If you could see the photo, you would see Jason in his Navy whites and April in her dress from a resale shop. They looked like they were living in a story that should end "and they lived happily ever after."

We were excited. We became step-grandparents on the very same day we became in-laws, so that was very exciting for us. We fell in love with these little girls. They gave my husband Gene a brand new name. They started calling him the Grampster. I think that is a cross between a hamster and a grandfather, and we're never really sure where in the continuum he falls. But they dove into my closet and they found long skirts and stiletto heels and scarves and beads. They were little ballerinas and they would twirl into the rooms and they would say, "Grampster, Grampster, we're all dressed up. Please take us on a date." I don't think my husband had ever been happier in his life than he was embracing grandparenting. It was so exciting.

For that first year of their marriage, we were looking forward to seeing them thrive. But in retrospect, as our son called home, we realized that he began eroding. He began to be filled with fear that the biological father of the girls would receive unsupervised visitation. A judge had put supervision in place because of the multiple allegations of abuse. But he had been behaving very well under supervision.

Just at that time, Jason received his first orders for out-of-the-continental-USA military service. That would be Hawaii, which would mean six-week visits with her father that he was not able to supervise. So Jason began to erode mentally, emotionally, spiritually. Instead of talking about his work with the Navy or global events, he was starting to talk about his extreme fear for the safety of his stepdaughters.

We had now watched one year of their marriage pass. We got home from a ministry engagement in St. Louis, Missouri, on a Sunday night. We were sound asleep and the phone rang. I remember looking at the clock. It said 12:35 AM. I saw Gene grab that phone and then I saw a look of shock and horror on his face. He pulled the phone away from his ear and he said, "Carol, Jason has just been arrested for the murder of his wife's first husband. He's in the jail in Orlando."

I had never been in shock before. Nausea swept over me. I tried to get out of bed; my legs would not hold my weight. I crawled my way on all fours and I got into my office. I thought, "I must be living in the middle of a horrific dream. This will soon end and everything will be okay."

We began to realize that we were in the middle of what we call a new kind of normal. We didn't go back to bed that night. We intermittently sobbed, we held each other, we started making a list. Jason was the first grandchild on both sides of the family, dearly loved by his grandparents and all of his cousins and his aunts and his uncles. He'd been a model student and he was always looked up to. It would take about an hour for each of those phone calls because people could not comprehend that he was capable of such a horrific act.

Our lives literally fell apart at that point emotionally. We just didn't know if we could continue on. Our full-time ministry was speaking and writing, and I thought, "Who would want the mother of a murderer to stand on their platform and speak? Who would read the book of a mother of a murderer?"

We went through two and a half years and seven postponements of his trial before he was eventually convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. There are so many mini-stories within the big story, but needless to say, my life turned upside down.

My little precious step-grandchildren were so precious to me. Because Jason is our only child, these are our only grandchildren. I watched as my daughter-in-law stayed with my son for six years before coming apart emotionally, waiting and waiting for some hope and never seeing any hope.

Then the hurricanes hit. There were three hurricanes that hit her city six years after she started this process. I saw it break her spirits as there was so much damage to her home. I watched her as she made other plans. She came to us and she said, "I need to give the girls some more normal life. It isn't normal for little girls to be in a prison every Saturday and Sunday. They need soccer on Saturday; they need church on Sunday. I'm moving out of state and I'm taking the girls, and I will no longer be in touch with you when I separate from Jason." The sorrow upon sorrow is impossible for me to describe, Ron, but it became a heart agony that I really have never had proper words for.

Ron Deal: I can just imagine somebody who's never heard your story listening to it for the very first time and just trying to put themselves into your shoes and going, "I don't even know where to begin." I know, as you said, there's tons of little narratives within the big overall narrative. You're a lot further down the road now, and we'll get to some of that here in a minute.

Early on, three hurricanes in six years, there's a metaphor. Everything was just, you were living in a hurricane constantly. There's lies, there's self-pity, there's shame, there's struggle. Do we stay in ministry? Do we not? All that stuff is just swirling. Looking back, tell us a little bit more about what that stuff did to you. How did you anchor your soul?

Carol Kent: I actually started writing down the lies of the enemy that came to us in those early months after Jason was arrested. One of them was: "I must have done something wrong as a parent or this would not have happened." I started to try to figure out what were the flaws in our parenting that would ever allow our son to do the unthinkable. It made me just come to grips with the fact that we must have done something just impossibly incorrect for our son to have made such an unwise choice.

Then the enemy attacked my spiritual life. I started to think: "If I had read my Bible more consistently, if I had prayed more fervently, if I had just been in the Word for an hour a day, I would have learned so much biblical truth, I could have figured this out before anything bad happened."

Then the enemy got into who I am. I'm the firstborn of six preacher's kids. I'm a preacher's kid too, so I feel your pain. That makes me bossy. I'm a control freak. I like to do things perfectly, and I'm a little bit of a workaholic. I like to have my to-do list and get everything crossed off. If I accomplish something of merit during the day that's not on the list, I write it down after I've accomplished it for the thrill of drawing a line through it.

Here was the lie the enemy came at me with: "If you had been less busy, you would have seen the problem coming and you could have fixed it before it happened." We were very much realizing that it was time for us to let our son leave and cleave. We needed to be absent enough so that they could form their own relationship without us being involved in major decisions all the time. We were trying hard to be good parents with a freshly married son, and yet at the same time, I kept thinking: "If I didn't have such a busy speaking schedule, if I hadn't committed to that next book contract, maybe I would have been able to have my antenna up enough to realize that these kids were in trouble."

Something major was going down. Then I found the enemy saying, "Carol, if you had been a more perfect Christian, God would have chosen to protect your family." I don't know why I thought that might have made us more special than anybody else's family. But as I looked at that list, I realized it was lies, lies, lies.

It was very important for me to recognize the lie and then to say, "Lord, I'm coming to You. I ask for forgiveness for believing this lie. I realize You love me as much as You ever have, and I receive that love and I need it." But I was really caught in those lies for a while.

Ron Deal: I am absolutely a kindred spirit in this story, and I think most of our listeners and viewers are too because everybody has got their thing, they've got their story. Whether it's by death, by divorce, by your decision choices, somebody else's choices and decisions, all of it has implication for how we think of ourselves, that sense of identity. This illusion of control that you're talking about, absolutely.

Nan and I every once in a while, we're 17 years out since our son's death, and every once in a while we still have to replay. I'll find myself just staring straight at a wall and Nan will say, "Where are you, babe?" I'm like, "Yeah, I was just having a conversation with the doctor again about questions I wish I would have asked when Connor was in the hospital."

Those things that we chase in ourselves thinking that we could have controlled and dictated the outcome in a different direction, and now that the terrible awful has happened, it still comes back. "What do I do now? How do I prevent other children or other circumstances or other things from going bad?"

There is in all of us this sense that we think we're big. I think what loss does, if nothing else, is it is one of God's little reminders of how small we are, not insignificant because we are significant to the Father. We are authentically loved by Him in deep ways that it's hard to fathom. But we're small in the sense of power. We're small in the sense of not being able to control our lives and what happens in our world.

That is the thing that we have to wrestle over and over and over again when we look back at the hard things that life throws at us. I just tell other parents and people we talk to, yeah, you've got to ask those questions. You've got to wrestle with that. You've got to have that wake-up at 3:00 AM moment where you're feeling a little guilty that you didn't do what you didn't do, just so you can come full circle and say, "But that's not who I am. Those moments didn't dictate my identity. That's not my worth. That's not my value. My value is great in the Father's eyes. It is even greater because of what Jesus is doing in me." Now I've got to lament and let it go. Is that a journey you have to circle back around from?

Carol Kent: Oh yes, and I find myself circling back around whenever I will have a little bit of extra time and I can rehearse the past. That will get me into trouble sometimes when you go back and you start reiterating to yourself what you could have done differently to change the circumstances so what happened would not have taken place. That can be a vicious cycle.

For me, it's been good to come to grips with the fact that I cannot change what has taken place, but I can change my attitude about the future. I can say in prayer, "Lord, how can I take what's happened and somehow make it an offering to You of how I can become a more compassionate person and help others who are going through tough times?" If I can make that my focus, then I wind up getting off that treadmill of a pity party.

Ron Deal: That is so very good. It occurs to me as you're saying that, what's wrapped up in this for me anyway, this is part of how I carry the sadness over what has happened. I tell people all the time, just because we find our hope and our direction and our future in Christ does not mean that the pain of the past, the sadness of the past is gone. Yes, there's beauty from ashes, but it doesn't destroy the ashes. We still stand in the ashes even as we're looking toward the beauty that is coming or is beginning to take place in our lives. One does not negate the other.

So how do you carry the sorrow, the sadness? Calendars, my wife puts it this way, the calendar won't stop. It won't stop reminding us of the terrible awful because birthdays roll around and holidays roll around and rituals and special occasions within the extended family, those are all reminders for everybody listening or watching right now. Whatever the thing is in your life, the calendar just doesn't stop. How do we carry the sadness even through the calendar moments right there side-by-side with the hope?

Carol Kent: I think for me, the most important thing has been to voice my sorrow to God, to be honest about it. I read in the Psalms where David would pour out his sorrow before the Lord. I remember at one point getting flat on the floor and I pounded the floor and I said, "Lord, I am overwhelmed with sorrow. I can hardly pick myself up off this floor. I give to You my sorrow, but I acknowledge that it's very real and that what has happened makes You sorrowful too because this act was rooted in sin."

I think when we acknowledge the sorrow, we can open ourselves up to falling into the embrace of the Father and just saying, "Lord, I'm just melting into Your love because I have nowhere else to go." I kind of think of when this first happened, Gene and I, my husband, would find ourselves nitpicking about little things. We really get along well. We've been married a long time and we're in sync with each other. We enjoy ministry together, travel together, and we're best friends. But we would nitpick about the craziest things.

I remember at one point we were in the master bedroom closet and Gene said, "Carol, I don't understand why you can't get rid of clothing you haven't worn for a whole year." I said, "Gene, I keep this house spotlessly clean and you complain about a few extra outfits in this closet? That is so wrong. That just is unfair." I remember bursting into tears over seemingly a small thing, and he put his arms around me and we both were weeping.

I said, "We're not really weeping about the clothes in the closet, are we?" Because it's those little tiny things that set you off and your heart is so full of sorrow you just need a reason to explode. We started letting the small stuff be the small stuff because we had enough big stuff we couldn't worry about the small stuff or we would just be an emotional mess all the time.

That's been a very important thing for me when I feel sadness. Let it out. Tell God about it. Sometimes I will acknowledge it to the person I'm with. This is a very hard day for me. I heard a song on the radio that was Jason's favorite song, and it just brings back all of those memories of the honors he got in high school and at the US Naval Academy and all that he's missing now because of his actions. When I acknowledge it to a caring Christian friend and I get the kind of support that comes in the form of hugs or somebody who will just listen without giving advice or quoting ten Bible verses, that is always a real gift.

Ron Deal: There's so much in what you just said. Acknowledging it to God, taking it to Him, He actually welcomes us pouring out our heart. That's what the laments teach us, that He wants to know what's on our heart. In the very act of that, I think activates God's compassion back toward us. That's when the hugs come, that's when the things that we can't describe through people or circumstances or just the touch of His Spirit is so very good.

But sometimes we do get cross. We do take stuff out on our family members. In those moments, you repair. You own it. You say, "Man, I am so sorry. That was wrong of me. I know where that's coming from, but no excuses. I shouldn't have treated..."

Grief is one of those things, it's the heart of life. Sometimes we get so tired of talking about it, we don't want to one more time say, "I know what this is about." We don't want to do that. Or we're sort of embarrassed. Here it is again. So we just pretend like it has no part in who I just was. I think just the opposite. I think the more we openly own that with one another, the more we create a safer environment for people to say the same about themselves or for them to turn toward you and say, "Oh my goodness, I didn't even think of that. All is forgiven." Those are the little repair moments that sort of help us find our way through.

I've got to ask you about another piece. Your son's in prison. He's still in prison. He's going to be in prison as far as you know, the rest of his life.

Carol Kent: Yes, he has a life without parole sentence. In Florida, that's called a toe tag sentence. It means you will never leave a Florida state penitentiary until you are dead with a tag on your toe. It is the rest of your life. That is the rest of my life, Ron.

Gene and I sometimes look at each other and we say, "Who will care for our son when we are gone?" That's a hard thing to face. He's been incarcerated 26 years. He turned 51 years old this year. He was incarcerated just days after his 25th birthday. That is an eternity of time.

So we've had to come to grips with the fact that this is, unless the law changes, we do not have hope of seeing him walk in freedom. There is no parole system in Florida anymore. You serve the entire length of your sentence. Politicians get elected on stricter and stricter mandatory minimum sentences, so it's not likely that that will change.

We've had to say: "How can we, in the middle of this journey, make the best of this situation?" Ron, that helped us to start looking around. I think any of us who have ever been in a hard place have had to say, "Okay, what do I have to be grateful for?"

It was really my son who prompted that thought in me. One weekend I was at the prison. I said, "Jason, how do you hold on to hope in the middle of a life sentence?" He said, "Mom, I have a gratitude list. Every time that cloud of depression and despair begins to come over me, I get out this piece of paper and I write down everything I have to be thankful for." He said, "I am thankful that I have two parents who will be my advocates for as long as they live." He said the average number of years a lifer like me even gets visits is five years, and then nobody comes anymore. Nobody puts money into the inmate account for the basics of personal hygiene items and postage stamps. Nobody cares. He said, "I have family members and friends who put enough in my account that I can share with those who have nothing. That's a lot to be grateful for."

Then Ron, he paused and he said, "I am thankful that on a compound that houses up to 1,600 men, I can be a missionary in a very dark place." Ron, one of the joys I have at this stage of my life is that I have watched my son use his education, his Christianity, and his leadership to make a huge difference in the lives of the inmates he's incarcerated with. We have a nonprofit organization that can provide him with funds for books and for Bible study resources and sometimes for food at programs or awards ceremonies.

I have watched Jason be a leader among these men, athletically and spiritually and mentally. It has been an incredible joy to watch what God is doing through Jason's ministry on the inside. Even though I don't want to think that he will never walk in freedom again, I know as a mama that if he never walks in freedom again, he has purposeful life. He has meaning that is just off the charts because he is not wasting his time behind bars. He's using it to invest in the lives of others.

Ron Deal: I'm going to ask our team to put a link in the show notes to that nonprofit. I'm just going to ask our listeners and viewers, donate five bucks. You know where it's going to end up, and you know how her son is going to be using this to bless other people in the circumstances that he's in.

It's very different, but I'm imagining somebody listening right now, a mom listening or a stepmom who's feeling disconnected from one of their kids because of life circumstances. It's not the same circumstance you're facing, but because of divorce, because of something in the backstory, they have lost connection with a child. Sometimes kids drift away from a parent because the rules are different in your household versus the other. All those little silly games and things that add up to: "Now there's a gap. Now there's distance." Maybe it's a stepmom whose heart is so big for their kids like your step-grandmother heart has been, and they just don't get much time and they feel the rejection of that.

What are some principles that people can hold on to, perhaps out of God's Word, but just for enduring that season as you have been for quite some time?

Carol Kent: I love this question because I believe that God's Word has answers to today's challenges and problems. I think the very first thing that strikes me is that God specializes in impossible relationships. I think of Luke 1:37, where Mary said, "For nothing will be impossible with God." Wow, that is so amazing to me. Sometimes we forget that we have a God of miracles and that He can work out situations, not in our timing, but in His timing.

I should add, as long as I'm on this principle, that I love to pray for the result that I want to experience. God has taught me that I can make requests, but I need to pray, "Lord, have mercy, Thy will be done." Right out of the Lord's Prayer. I am learning to pray that way. I have prayed for freedom for my son for 26 years. But I am learning that God may choose to be glorified in a different way than I would like to see Him glorified. So I am learning how to say "Thy will be done" in prayer while realizing God specializes in impossible situations and He's capable of a miracle in a relationship situation.

One of the things that has been important for me is to realize I'm not defined by someone else's rejection. I think of how much God loves us in Isaiah 43:1 when we read, "I have called you by name. You are mine." How precious that is to think of how much God loves us.

The other thing I want to say to all of those who are listening to our voices today is that often we feel like such failures due to a marriage situation or a situation with a child or a stepchild or step-grandchild as it is in my case. I was teaching a Bible Study Fellowship class and the news of what had happened with our son had become very public. It was in the local paper. I remember a woman who was in that class coming up to me and she said, "Carol, I used to think you were perfect, but now I think we could be friends."

I think sometimes we think that we are supposed to be these perfect Christians who do everything with such grace and according to God's principles that people will see perfection. No, they need to see imperfect people who know how to get back up and trust God in the middle of the tough experiences and the saddest days. I hope that's helpful to somebody who might be listening today.

Realize that love can be expressed even through boundaries. Proverbs 4:23 says, "Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it." So sometimes if we find people are being unkind or cruel, we need to separate ourselves for a bit from that person until they might be in a different place or position. But when we've done everything we know how to do biblically and personally to make it right, sometimes you need to set a boundary. I needed to learn that it was okay to do that periodically.

Probably the last thing I want to share, Ron, is God wastes nothing. Even this pain has purpose. I remember that when Jason was arrested, people would come to the house and they would throw an arm around us and they would say, "For remember, all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose." Romans 8:28.

In my heart, I just wanted to punch them because I thought, "You don't understand my pain. You can't possibly know what I'm going through." Then I realized that I needed to memorize Romans 8:29 with Romans 8:28 because God's goal for our lives is that we would be conformed to the image of Christ. Suffering is what Jesus went through, and often suffering, as much as we don't want it, is what conforms us to the image of Christ and helps us to live out His purpose for our lives. That has been a truth that has stayed with me for many years.

Ron Deal: So very good. I want to react to a couple of things that you just said because they're so helpful. By the way, Romans 8:27 sets the tone, I think, for Romans 8:28. That basically is where Paul reminds us that the Spirit is groaning on our behalf. He is speaking on behalf of those of us who cannot voice ourselves what we're going through, don't have the words, don't have the answers. That groaning is a call back to lament that you were talking about earlier in the Psalms. So here it is again: we lament before the Lord and trust that He is using what He's doing to move us further down the road, to strengthen our faith, to deepen our walk with Him. Ultimately, that's a purpose that can come out of difficult things. It doesn't excuse or give permission to those difficult things, of course, but it certainly is part of the picture.

One other thought. When you referenced the Lord's Prayer a minute ago and praying the Lord's will over our circumstances, absolutely. Pray what you want and ask for it, and then say, "But Your will be done." I find it really interesting the next line in the Lord's Prayer is "Give us this day our daily bread." I think sometimes when we're trying to endure a really long road or a difficult circumstance, that praying for daily bread is really important.

I've often said I've never prayed for bread a day in my life in the sense of I've got plenty to eat. My cupboards have always had plenty of food in them. But after Connor died, I didn't know how to breathe. That was the bread I needed. What I needed was sustenance. I didn't know how to go one minute to the next, let alone think about next year, next month, next week, tomorrow.

For me, daily bread was: "How do I just continue getting up and going?" What I've found, 17 years into this journey, is somehow the Lord provides. It could be through a person, it could be through His Word, it could be through a reminder, it could be through a memory, it could be through a circumstance, a hug from my wife or my other children. Somehow it's been enough sustenance to get me through the next day. I think God is just as good at that, especially for those who are praying His will over their lives.

One last question, Carol. You're 26 years into this journey. What's different for you now? The journey is the same; it really hasn't changed. Day in and day out, it's still the reality you're living. What's different for you at this point in the journey than in the beginning?

Carol Kent: The big thing that's different is that for all of these years, we have been waiting in prison visitation lines every weekend when we go to see our son. Often we are in those lines more than two hours before we get through security. You meet a lot of families when you're in a long line, and there are children of inmates, wives, girlfriends, moms, fathers that are there waiting to go in. So you make acquaintances and friendships with people you might never have met under normal circumstances.

Out of that has grown compassion, and it has been one of those things that fuels our desire through speakupforhope.org to be involved in ministering to those families of inmates. We've been able to put games in the visitation areas. We've been able to send what we call boxes of hope to wives and moms of inmates. They are boxes that are filled with comfort items for women as well as great Christian books, reading material, sometimes Bibles or gifts for their children.

I find that the more I get my eyes on somebody who needs help more than I do, the more my own pain is alleviated and the more joy I have in the process of living my life for things that will outlast it. I would just say to anybody listening today some good advice from Eric Liddell, the Olympian. He said, "Circumstances may appear to wreck our lives and God's plans, but God is not helpless amid the ruin." If we can keep our eyes on Him in the middle of our journey and realize He is there wanting to encourage us, coach us, and to say, "Atta girl, atta boy, you can do this," we will feel loved by Him, embraced by Him, and we'll want to do more of what we can do to help others.

Ron Deal: Carol, thank you very much for being with us today.

Carol Kent: You are so welcome. Thank you.

Ron Deal: If you want to learn more about Carol, her books, or her speaking schedule, look in the show notes. We're going to get you connected. If this podcast has been helpful to you in any way, would you just give us a quick review or rating? That helps other people find us. If you don't mind, you can donate to help us produce more practical material here at FamilyLife. All gifts to FamilyLife are tax-deductible. Just use the link in the show notes and it'll get to our department, FamilyLife Blended specifically.

One of the things we do here at FamilyLife Blended is equip leaders and professionals to better minister to and support blended families. We even have an online certificate program in blended family ministry that you can do at your own pace and on your own time. Check the show notes for that if you'd like to learn more about it, and why don't you share that with a leader in your congregation as well?

Next time, I'm going to be talking with Brian and Debbie Doyle about fatherhood, marriage in later life, and caring for children as they become adults. That's next time on FamilyLife Blended. I'm Ron Deal. Thanks for listening or watching, and thank you to our production team and donors who make this podcast possible. FamilyLife Blended is part of the FamilyLife Podcast Network, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.