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Joni & Ken: An Untold Love Story Reviewed By Conny Crisalli of Bookpleasures.com
- By Conny Withay
- Published April 14, 2013
- Biographies & Memoirs
Conny Withay
Reviewer Conny Withay:Operating her own business in office management since 1991, Conny is an avid reader and volunteers with the elderly playing her designed The Write Word Game. A cum laude graduate with a degree in art living in the Pacific Northwest, she is married with two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren.
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Author: Ken & Joni
Eareckson Tada with Larry Libby
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN:
978-0-310-31469-1
“Joni and I have talked about it, and I
don’t think a lot of couples get a chance at a love like this, at
closeness like this. It’s like all this has been a gift God has
given us,” Ken confides in an interview with James Dobson in Ken
and Joni Eareckson Tada’s book, Joni & Ken – An Untold Love
Story.
At one hundred and eight-seven pages, this hardbound
book is written in third person with the assistance of Larry Libby.
Targeted toward Christians, it discusses the trials and tribulations
of a married couple’s life living with one having major physical
disabilities while trying to purposefully trust God. The first four
pages include the book’s accolades with Libby’s preface
following. After ten chapters with sixteen pages of photographs, Joni
concludes writing a personal note and acknowledgements.
Marriage
is challenging; marriage with physical difficulties is even more
challenging. In this memoir, Joni and Ken explain through a third
person’s set of eyes how they met, married and adjusted through
over thirty years of ups and downs of life that included her being a
quadriplegic with chronic pain and breast cancer.
The first
chapter starts in 2011 when wheel-chair ridden Joni, known for her
Christian outreach ministry to the disabled community, is diagnosed
with breast cancer. Ken, her husband who is a high school teacher, is
used to the day to day pattern of years taking care of his wife as
both question one more test God is giving them.
Two chapters
later, flashbacks of meeting one another at church, courting,
marrying and traveling while dealing with ongoing health concerns set
a pattern for the rest of the book while each spouse separately
searches for his or her place in a marriage that gives them little
time together, constant dealings with medical issues, vented
arguments and silent emotional hurts as all focus is on Joni and her
public persona.
When depressed and despondent Ken revisits his
past, upbringing and need for his father’s approval, he realizes
that he must give all to God to be able to become the husband he is
supposed to be. At the end of rope with pneumonia after her
chemotherapy, Joni has to finally recognize how God has given her a
true man that seeks Christ first, in spite of her selfishness,
perfectionism and strong-willed ego.
Although there is
over-lapping repetition due to the flashbacks and majority of the
scenarios are viewed from only Joni’s perspective and opinion, it
is revealing to see that marriages with physical disabilities have
the same problems as those that do not and that we all should
ultimately rely on the Lord. Ken puts it all in perspective when he
says, “Joni, if I met all your expectations, you wouldn’t need
God!” which, years later, makes sense to the couple deeper in love
with Christ and each other.
Hoping not misconstrued, this
reader questions one line of Joni’s salvation story: “how Jesus
Christ won the right to be her substitute on the cross” when in
actuality, one should be eternally grateful that Christ willingly
died on the cross, enabling the forgiveness of sins.
This book
was furnished by Zondervan for review purposes.
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