Life Interrupted by Murder and Prison with Carol and Gene Kent (episode 16)

0:00 Do you love a prodigal? Do you feel like you're lost in a scary and endless wilderness? Welcome to the When You Love a Prodigal podcast. I am Judy Douglass and I spent more than 15 years in that wilderness. I believe together we will discover help and hope for your journey. Well, welcome back to When You Love a Prodigal podcast. I am so excited that you are here today for this session that we're having. It's going to be so special. My very special guests are Eugene. Oh no, he said Gene. Gene and Carol Kent. And they have had an amazing ministry. Carol has started the Speak Up ministries that includes training on speaking and smaller groups now and a master class and all sorts of things. And Gene basically is the behind the scenes making it all stay together. And that's wonderful. But what we'll really hear from them today is because they have a ministry called Speak Up for Hope. And that's because of a very challenging and hard event in their life. And they're going to tell us a little bit about it. So Carol and Gene, thank you for being here. Welcome. And I just have a

1:33 first question for you. And that is give us a little of the background that especially led into Speak Up for Hope. Okay. Judy, you've already gotten me in trouble with my mother for... She would be very happy that you called me Eugene though. That's who I did it for. Moms need all the affirmation they can get. They certainly do. And she would probably say that I was a prodigal but not very long. Of course, out of three brothers, she loved me the most. Of course. And that just does bring up our past, which I grew up in a family that... We lived in a little town in Michigan and my father worked on the railroad. We never went to church. At least I should say my mom and dad never went. They would send us three boys. I'm the oldest of three boys. They'd send us down the street to a church. And so I just remember going to a Sunday school class there, but I never really heard the gospel.

2:38 But when I was in the ninth grade, a new family moved to town and they had a red haired daughter who was in my class. And I knew her name was Carol and that's about all I knew about her. And so we just knew each other in school. This was Carol Affman. And anyway, for a couple years everything went along. My dad though had an ulcer when I was in the 11th grade and he was hospitalized. While he was in the hospital, Carol's father, because the reason they moved to this little town was he was a pastor. And he was a pastor of a small church there. And he made hospital calls and stopped in the room my dad was in, invited him to church. So we started going. Mom and dad, or dad came home from the hospital and said, we're going to start visiting this church. And I said, what? My dad was very strict so we had to do what he said. And we started visiting this church and that was the first I heard the gospel then where her father would open the Bible and he would take a passage of scripture and explain it. And then he would show how Jesus was the major part of that explanation and he wanted to be part of my life. And he would give that invitation at the end if anybody who was interested in finding out more about Jesus to come down front. And I was very interested but I'm not going down front because they're going to take you in the back room and I don't know what they do with you. So a few weeks later her mother and father came over to our house and they came in, sat around our kitchen table and

4:12 I stood there as a 17 year old listening while her father had a coffee cup in one hand, had his Bible in the other hand and he explained the gospel to my parents. And then he got to the end of it and he looked at my railroad, tough, very strict father and he asked him if he was willing to get on his knees around that table and to confess his sin and ask Christ into his heart. And I thought my dad's going to hit this guy but he didn't. He said yes he wanted to do that. And my mother said yes and I just spoke up and said can I do that too? And the three of us began our spiritual journey right then. And Judy, it is. And mom and dad got home and told me Gene Kent had just become a Christian and that increased the dating pool to three because we were only allowed to date Christians. And so little did I know while I was at home doing the mundane job of babysitting my mother and dad were out winning my future husband to Jesus Christ.

5:10 Oh, how awesome. So we got married right after we got out of college and five years later we gave birth, I gave birth, I did the hard labor to Jason Paul Kent and he was a great young man, loved Jesus, went to the Naval Academy, made his parents proud and he met and married a previously married woman who had two little girls. And there were multiple allegations of abuse involving the biological father and Jason became very anxious and in retrospect we saw him unraveling mentally, emotionally and spiritually as his fears for his girls increased. And we got a middle of the night phone call one year after they were married telling us her son had been arrested for the murder of his wife's first husband and he was in the jail in Orlando.

5:59 And we went through two and a half years and seven postponements of the trial before our son was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. What a hard, hard thing, hard to live through. It is still a hard thing. I know. It is still a hard thing. We're living it. But we are here to say that in the middle of the deepest sorrow parents can go through with whatever their situation is with their own child. God is still in control and he has a plan beyond what we can see at the moment and even today. Even today, yes. Wow. That's such a hard place to be and many of our listeners are in hard places and they might not be that but they will be very challenging to them and fearful and you're out of control. You don't know what to do and that's what we're hoping to do is provide some pathways and some help. We're going to be starting after this, the one that will come after this will be on the subject of time. And the reason that we talk about time and I know you've even asked this question is that is one of the most common questions people who love a prodigal will ask, how long Lord? When will this end? How long does this go on? And so we're going to be looking at some things

7:29 that help us have God's perspective on time and deal with time. And as we have talked, you've told me some things you've had to learn in the area of time. And so maybe you could kind of begin with that. Well Judy, one of the things that happened after Jason's conviction in Sentencing is that I wrote a book called When I Lay My Isaac Down on giving up what you love most and in our case our child to the God who loved our child even more than we did. And then 10 years went by and the publisher said I think this book needs another chapter. And Judy, you just hit it right on the head, that nail on the head because that chapter is on perseverance.

8:16 And when you think about time, you think oh Lord, won't you give me the answer to my prayer now? I have begged, I have pleaded for something to change, something to budge. And so many parents deal with that and then a child who's caught in addiction winds up back in addiction and a child… So often. Yes, too often. And you say Lord, why aren't you answering my prayer? And so one of the things we are learning is that we're not home yet and sometimes we don't get the answers to our prayers in our timing or in this lifetime. But that does not mean that there can't be purpose and meaning and hope and faith and an ability to help others along the way who have also known what it's like to wait on a prodigal. And so I'm here to say that time doesn't have to be our enemy. Time can be our friend because it draws us closer to the Lord and it helps us to see with an eternal focus instead of just what's in front of us which is the next huge obstacle and disappointment.

9:28 Do you have something to add to that as the dad in this situation? I know how hard this is. Not yours. It's maybe harder than most of them, but it's a hard thing, the waiting and not knowing. Judy, that is so true. I know when this first happened, you know, and we had to wait two and a half years before we even had a trial. And while we were doing that waiting, we kept wondering why do we have to wait so long? We understand now that there's reasons to wait and all of the details have to come out before a trial can take place. And then when the results of the trial and the sentencing took place and he was found guilty, you know, I remember I do lots of walking. And so I would be out walking and I would look up towards the heavens and I would often walk in the evening and see all of those stars up there and ask God why did he get the sentence of life in prison without parole? You know, and I don't even have a handle on what that means as far as intellectually I know it just means okay he's never going to come out of prison until he dies. And as a father, that's not what I would like to see. So I know that he's got to find something meaningful in life because

11:01 that's what I have to do too. That's what all of us have to do as we deal with whatever time we have is we have to find something meaningful. And the more we can do that, then we see God using whatever it is that that we find our hands to do. So we have lots of assignments for our son or he gives us assignments too but he finds a lot of things to do especially for other men there which helps him see that his time is not wasted. That helps. Yes. That you're not just living here with nothing. Yes. And so maybe we'll get a little more on that in a little bit. But you talked to me about making hope-filled choices and that was part of your survival through this was learning to make the choices that gave hope.

11:54 So one of them you mentioned was choosing life over emotional death. What does that mean? Judy, in the beginning when all of this happened the word got out and people started sending us cards and they came from all over the country because we've ministered in many places and many of them are sympathy cards. The kind you get when somebody passes away. Yes. And let's be honest they don't have a Hallmark greeting card line for you to send to parents whose children have committed murder. So they were doing the best they could with the lyrics they found. And I remember one day going through those cards and I tossed them in the air and I said my son is not dead he is alive. And then it hit me once again somebody else's son was dead. There was a father. There was a stepmother. There was a sister. They were planning a funeral while we were planning a trial for first degree murder. So immediately we began praying for the family of the deceased knowing they were in agony of soul. And our son would be the first to say that what he did was against the laws of God in man and he had begun to make an idol out of his own ability to save his girls from what he perceived was a danger. And he may not have known all of the facts but that's what he believed. And so we we just realized that we could live in this state of of sadness all the time and choosing to curl up in the embryo position and choose not to go out in public or we could move in a different direction called life. And one

13:31 of my friends started sending me shoebox greeting cards instead of sympathy cards. They would say things like brain cells come and brain cells go but fat cells live forever or I'm a perfect ten I just keep it covered with fat so it won't get scratched. And I found myself laughing out loud and it surprised me because I really didn't know if I could ever laugh again. And it was a reminder to choose life. Is there any splash of joy in this day that I can choose in the middle of this great sorrow? And then God brought scripture to mind like John 10 10 I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly. So we started to be intentional after a while we had to allow ourselves a lot of time to grieve but we became intentional about saying what are we going to do today that will be life giving instead of energy draining. That's beautiful and helpful. What specifically can you give an example of you chose to do this to get life coming from this instead of. Well in my case I started to go out in public again because I was hiding.

14:47 I pulled the shades. I would peek to see who was at the door before I would let anybody in because so many times when you have a prodigal you have false shame and false guilt about what your child has done and I was trying to protect myself. So a huge step forward to me was to step out in public and face other people knowing they knew what my son had done and Jean how about you. I know one of one of the first things that I did was one of the guys that I knew at church was a Christian counselor and I was dealing with guilt you know which is false guilt a man dealing with shame as Carol said. But anyway I called up this guy his name is Dan and I just said hey I need to talk to you about something and so we ended up having breakfast together and for about the next 15 years we had breakfast one morning a week for about the next 15 years and just talked about life and so it was a mutually good thing that we did together. So I ended up just helping put my life in perspective because all of us you know as we deal with prodigal children as we deal with whatever the situation we have is trying to put that in perspective and we often find once we when we do hear other people's stories we find out boy my story is not that bad compared

16:19 to some other yes and I wouldn't trade places with some people that we've talked. Yes I've been there as well. Well you mentioned several times shame and one of the things you told me was that you had to learn to choose vulnerability which is means shame or fear or just hiding from people who are going to ask you or assume things. So how did you learn how were you able to be vulnerable with people? Well Judy I had taught a Bible study fellowship class and there were about 350 women in that study every week. They knew me well and I trained a group of leaders who were precious friends to me and I decided that I either had to hide or I had to tell my story. There was no middle ground there. We had to be the real deal with the people we knew and Jean and I discussed this together. What were we going to do? Were we going to quit ministry and ever being on a public platform again or were we going to say this is what has happened to us and this is what we've learned and this is what God has done for us and you can find hope and help too. So I just remember so vividly going into the beauty salon to get my hair colored and cut for the first time after the news came out in our paper and I'll never forget that feeling of walking in and looking around

17:52 and noticing that everybody was quiet all of a sudden like oh no, oh no the mother of the murderer just walked in or I bet she's embarrassed to be seen in public today. I don't know if I should look up or down. This is really awkward. I thought I could read their minds. I'm glad you can laugh now. Oh wow the thoughts were just swirling and I was tempted to turn and run but in the back of that salon I saw Azam, my Iranian eyebrow plucker and precious Azam saw my need and felt my pain and she took me by the hands, took me to the back of the salon, she put her arms around me and she cried and she said oh Carol I'm so sorry about what's happened. I pray for you. I pray for your husband. I pray for your son and then she pointed at the wall that separated us from all of the other people and she said don't you worry about them. They will find someone else to talk about next week and you know what she was right. I've discovered most people have enough trouble of their own. They don't have time to think about our trouble all the time and after I began sharing one of those women who had been in my Bible study class came to me one day and she said Carol I used to think you were perfect but now I think we could be friends and she was really saying thank you for being the real deal. Thank you for not hiding what has happened. Thank you for not justifying it because it was wrong.

19:20 It was horrific, horrendous sin on the part of our son and no matter what his reasons or what he believed about the father of the deceased he believed that it was wrong and so she said thank you for not hiding that and for telling us what happened. I needed to know that and so from then on we started being honest after the trial with our audiences and I had a woman come up to the book table afterwards and she was all hunched over. She said my husband's been incarcerated for the last 18 years and nobody knows he's getting out in one month and I looked at her and I said is he coming home to live with you? She said yes we're going to try to make a go of it and then she stood to her full height and with confidence she said today you've given me the courage to start telling my story.

20:17 I'm going to quit hiding in false shame and false guilt and I'm going to tell people what's happened to us. I want to give people hope the way you have given me hope. Well behind her there were three young adult girls and they were holding hands and one of them spoke up and said Carol we're sisters. We sat out in the auditorium after you spoke and we decided if you can have the courage to tell your story we can tell ours. We were repeatedly abused by our daddy during our growing up years and we have never told the secret we are going to get Christian counseling what Jean found was important right in the beginning and then we're going to share with other victims of abuse so we can help them to find the courage to help others and to overcome what has happened to them. And that is such a gift when God takes the struggles and the pain and the hard hard things in our lives and turns them around to minister to other people to give them hope. Yes. Anything else you wanted to add? Judy you know we who believe in the scriptures of the Bible find a very unique thing in that God in as God tells various stories about famous people in the scriptures he points out all he points everything out about them not just the good things that they did but he also is not afraid of showing the bad choices that they make to just like David in the scriptures

21:52 you know is ended up committing murder of all things and God is just notorious for for being transparent about mankind you know and then all of that is for a purpose so that we can all see that hey he forgives and that's what we want to communicate with people. That's beautiful and that's a main message of my book and my ministry is love mercy grace and that's what God gives and then the amazing thing is he then lets it flow through us to other people and when you have been able to step aside from the shame and instead embrace the fact that God would bring good out of it what a what a thing and your son has done the same. Yes he has. So that's amazing. You mentioned to me a number of other choices we need to make on a long painful journey. One would be forgiveness one is gratitude one is staying power or perseverance anything you could comment on those. Well I want to just say about gratitude that one weekend I was visiting my son and 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 despair and depression comes over me I get out a sheet

23:26 of paper and I write down everything I have to be thankful for and he said I am thankful I have two parents who will be my advocates for as long as they live. I am thankful that on a compound that houses up to seventeen hundred men I can be a missionary on the inside he said that's a lot to be thankful for and we began trying to make lists ourselves of things we could be thankful for and one was that we had stretcher bearers people who were on an email update list who carried us when we could not carry ourselves and they made monetary gifts we were desperate. They you know yes we were people who were can do firstborn people Jean and I are both firstborns you know what that makes both of us bossy and so we had to learn how to be gracious receivers instead of always being the people who were on the giving end and that was a hard lesson. Yes that is a hard lesson and so as we began this journey we discovered that the more thankful our hearts were the more we were able to praise God in all things and and I think you know one of the other things I had to do was that whole thing of staying power and Jean and I actually co-wrote a book with David and Cindy Lambert this year on staying power and honey you want to just comment on how we've

24:57 had to learn we're in this together. Yes you know often times we get mad over things. I know that. And I was just going to say men get perhaps more outwardly mad than women seems like women are better at keeping it hidden at times. We keep secrets. Okay thank you and but I remember when we when we first began our journey and the sentencing had been done and everything and we were just we were at home trying to figure out what to do with life and I just remember being in our closet one day and Carol is very organized her desk is very organized and our life is very organized but when we get to the closet the closet is not very organized and I just one day out of the clear blue it seemed like it was out of the clear blue I just blew up about and I wish you could organize this closet too Carol and give up clothing you haven't worn in the past year so it could be less crowded and my response was just to burst out in an angry tone and say I keep this house so neat how dare you criticize the way I keep this closet and then I found myself falling into his arms we both had tears and we looked at each other and one of us said you know this

26:27 isn't the real issue is exactly that is not what this is a no and and so we realized that the small stuff escalates into big stuff because of the issue you're having with your prodigal and we had to learn to practice to get back to one of those other words you mentioned instant forgiveness and to become what we we've in our staying power book we talk about choosing to be unaffendable that that I look at you and I know you love me you could preach in the world today and his heart toward me is good I know he loves me we've we've had a lot of years together and so I am going to choose even though your tone hurt my feelings and really what seemed a bit aggressive I am going to choose to forgive you because I know your heart toward me is loving and kind that's beautiful yes you know what I should throw in here where we went to college was just a very strict school and one of the interesting things about it was you couldn't you it was almost that you couldn't have a date on the campus but you could they had one place that you could go for a date and that was the dating parlor and it and it looked like it looked like a big furniture store and they had couches and chairs in the dating parlor and you could go you could meet your date there and you would have to check in and then you were assigned a two chairs to

28:00 sit in or a couch and then they had monitors who walked around to made sure that you weren't touching each other so we know this is very hard for the listeners to believe that we were at an actual an actual school like that but you know what happened by having to live like that for a few months which was for three years and is that it caused us to talk and so many couples don't talk enough right and talk about the important things in life so we ended up you know as 19 20 21 year olds we were just talking about what we wanted out of life and we quickly found that we wanted similar things that we wanted to have honesty between each other and we wanted to you know that I wanted her to know that if I do get upset about something I'm not mad at her I'm mad at the situation you know and all of those kinds of things we talked about a lot before marriage took place so we had our own premarital counseling and that in that kind of setting.

29:12 Well and I should add that one of the things we talk about in the staying power power book is that it's good to make pre-decisions and those pre-decisions are I am going to be committed to you no matter what that I that is an absolute in my life I will be committed to you and so when we make that decision ahead of time it helps us when we hit the really tough stuff with our kids. Well and people who have prodigals their marriages are at risk yes and it drives a wedge or it creates so much tension in their individual lives that they take it out on each other so these are wonderful advice giving kinds of life giving things that you're sharing that can help them persevere through this hard journey.

30:05 You know Judy sometimes we forget that we do have an enemy. Oh I don't forget that usually. And we don't talk about it very much that there is an enemy of our souls as believers and he wants to wreak havoc he wants to have all of our marriages torn apart he wants our lives torn apart he wants us to have have upheaval in our lives and to not have peace and to not have friendship and security and he doesn't want us to have communication with each other. Right. And I know just what ministry that Campus Crusade does is it wants to promote communication and ministry one to another and to share that that Jesus Christ makes that all possible.

31:00 Thank you Lord that that is true. That is true. You say one of the important things to do is to have purposeful action steps. Yes. What would some of those be? Well when I think about purposeful action I think Jean and I together soon found ourselves standing in a long line waiting to get through the intake process sometimes up to two hours in blistering sun or torrential rain and we met a whole lot of families. That is to go into the prison. Yes to go to visit our son. And we met families and many of them had children who were waiting in that long line and we started to hear what the needs were and how some of them were feeding a family of four kids and the mom who was bringing the kids in and the dad who was incarcerated feeding six people out of the vending machines in the food window and that they needed funds.

31:55 And then we saw how tattered the games were in the visitation area and we learned from our son that the men needed reading material and some of them were in Bible study programs and needed books for their small groups and the Lord put it on our hearts to do something. So for us that purposeful action involved launching what we call Speak Up for Hope which is a non-profit organization that benefits inmates and their families. And Jean you want to share some of the things we do and how you work with Jason with helping the guys on the inside. Especially during the pandemic times you know visitation for what six or eight almost eight months there was no visitation in Florida prisons and I know it's true in most prisons much yes much of the country and then they just started visitation again a couple of months ago but it's just very very strict.

32:54 And we knew that that the families weren't able to get in and see their loved one but Jason knew knows lots of men there because our son has been in prison now for over 21 years. So it's been a long time and he knows lots of men there we know lots of families and so he knows that there's men there who never get a visit either. And so he and I usually especially at Christmas time he would pick out 20 or 30 or 40 different guys who don't get visits and we would either buy books for that person and have them sent to him knowing that that's coming from Speak Up for Hope or we'll have money put in their inmate account and the inmate account is what the inmate can use to go to the canteen and buy some snacks.

33:51 Now some people might think well you know snacks that's not a very biblical ministry but these men the kinds of foods that they get in the cafeteria are not the best kinds of foods either well they're not very tasty and men who don't have anybody who helps them financially at all don't get a snack you know and especially with the pandemic we all are pretty notorious for liking our snacks anymore. And so Jason would earmark and tell me about different men and then Speak Up for Hope would put money in their accounts but we would also put it in then I would send them a note and on the note I would tell them that you know so much money is going into your account and we would just like you to consider using half of the money on yourself and then identifying another guy that you would use the other half of the money for or whatever amount you want and we had some great response from guys who did that and one guy wrote me back and said you wrote me that and I thought to myself I'm spending all this money on myself I am not helping anybody else but he said a couple days later he still had money left because he hadn't spent it all and he said you know that probably would be a good idea so he did help some other guys too.

35:22 What a wonderful thing. So go ahead. Well Judy what's been exciting is the fan went out in the dorm of 70 guys where Jason is and the Florida prisons are not air conditioned so it's over a hundred degrees during many weeks of the summer which is very difficult and Speak Up for Hope was able to buy a commercial grade fan and Jason said it calms their nerves it's like oh they can get in the breeze of that fan and it calms tempers down it's been amazing then it is so thrilling we get to send boxes of hope to wives and moms of inmates and one mom said this arrived on my birthday how did you know and they're filled with comfort items for women and we didn't know God knew.

36:07 God knew. And so we give guys postage stamps I mean for them to be able to write a letter and we work with a company that supplies year old but brand new greeting cards at a great discount for prisons and the guys can send a real birthday card or a real Christmas card to their family members and we have found that when we give gifts of love like that it tenderizes their heart for the gospel. I was speaking in one prison not the one where Jason is one day and an inmate came up to me and he said Mrs. Kent I know your son I used to be in the prison where he is located and he shared Jesus with me and he said I was in a cult I didn't care at all about the gospel but he said Jason planted seeds in my heart that made me think and I've come to this prison and I have recently accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior will you thank your son for being the first person who introduced me to who Jesus was and tell him I now live for him.

37:11 Did you have a few tears? More than a few. More than a few. More than a few I'm sure. Any kind of sum up where Jason is now what the situation is? He has been in over 21 years. This is an emotional time right now because just two days ago we got word from the governor's office about the clemency application that Jason had in working on clemency. Clemency is a political process and you have politicians who vote on clemency and we weren't asking to get out of prison tomorrow.

37:54 He's got a life sentence which means he's never going to get out of prison unless he dies. So we were asking and he was asking for the powers that be for the clemency board to consider a commutation of sentence which means to get it changed from a life sentence to 30, 40 years so that there's an end of sentence date. And about eight years ago we went through clemency and it was turned down then and we just went through the same process now and it finally got to the top of the pile and it's been looked at and they've just decided to not show clemency on any murder cases in this state right now.

38:38 So we had to tell our son yesterday that the clemency process was over again and he's got to wait five years before he could reapply and he's now 46 years old but he's got a great attitude about it. He knows that God is using him where he is and he's probably taken about 1,000 guys through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University too. So we'll be sitting there at visitation when visitation starts again and an inmate will bring his wife or his girlfriend over to our table and he will talk to us about, will you talk to my wife or my girlfriend why she shouldn't buy a new car?

39:22 Not that you can't buy a new car but as Dave Ramsey would share anyway, financially these people don't have very much money as most inmate families don't. Judy, one other thing that was really precious to me, one of the things Jason said, as we were just going through the emotions of being turned down, having been through this, at one point he said, Mom, we just have to realize life is short. God knows if I can serve him better on the inside or the outside and he said, then life is over and like this, we're all in heaven and we are all walking in freedom and I knew he was going to be okay.

40:05 Yeah, that's a wonderful thing to hear. And I'm sure that the three of you together have shed a lot of tears and yet God has given you peace and joy and a fruitful ministry as a result, things you would never have been able to do before. And that's a beautiful thing. I wish we had lots more time but you have several books that you wanted to mention so tell us about those. Well, the one we mentioned earlier is When I Lay My Isaac Down. It's just been released in paperback with a study guide in the back and that extra chapter on perseverance.

40:47 And then we mentioned Staying Power, which is the book on marriage, which has to do with building a stronger marriage when life is tearing you apart and it deals a whole lot with parents of prodigals. So I think it would really be of help to your audience. And then I had real trouble reading the Bible because my mind was so upset about what I was going through and I soon realized I needed to concentrate on one verse at a time because that's all my mind could hold. And then I would say, Lord, what are you speaking into my life as a result of this scripture? And so I wrote out what I call listening prayers, like a paraphrase of what God was speaking over my life as a result of that scripture.

41:30 So I went to the publishing house and I said, I'd love to do a year's worth of devotions with a topic, just a five minute devotional, a key quotation that paraphrased prayer over someone's life and the actual scripture on the page so it could give them hope. And they said yes. And that book is called He Holds My Hand. He Holds My Hand. Yes. We just thank the Lord that he never leaves us, he's there with us and he's holding our hands. Yes. And in any other way we need holding up. That's right. Yes. So you wanted to offer something about your book? Yes.

42:10 If anyone would like a free digital download of a sampler from that book, He Holds My Hand, you can get some of the devotions. If you will just get out your cell phone and text the number 55444 and then in the place where you would normally write someone a message, just write giveaway. It can be an upper or lowercase, all one word, 55444, giveaway. And then they will receive a portion. Yes. A sample. They will get sample devotions from He Holds My Hand. That they can download right there. Right there. Technology, Judy, it's just amazing. It's way beyond me, but I have young people around me.

42:51 So thank you so much. Thank you. This has been absolutely wonderful. I know that our listeners will be so blessed and encouraged and given hope and some practical things to do. May I pray for you? I would love that. Father, I do thank you for Jane and Carol and Jason. And I just ask again for your blessing on them. Thank you for the way that you have taken the things that the evil one meant for evil. The harm that he was seeking to do to Jason and also to Jason's parents.

43:32 And you've taken that and you've made it a good outcome. It's still a hard thing, but it's an outcome of lives that are being touched, people who are being rescued, needs that are being met. And what a gift. I love that you take those hard things in our lives and you turn them into gifts to us and to the other people that we encounter. So bless them beyond what they even asked or imagined. Thank you in Jesus' name. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you so much, Judy. My privilege. Thank you for joining me today on the When You Love a Prodigal podcast.

44:18 If you enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe, rate, and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Your review helps the show reach more people with the hope and encouragement of Jesus. Don't forget, take a look at the show notes and for more helpful information, resources, and books, check out judydouglass.com. That's Douglass with two S's. You can find me on Facebook and on Twitter and Instagram at judydouglass417. Until next week.