God of Second Chances

In the new classic movie You've Got Mail (a remake of an old classic, Shop Around the Corner), Tom Hanks' character tells Meg Ryan's character that everything in life has a link to a line in The Godfather triology. In my life, music trumps movies, and the musician whose lyrics link to everything else, for me, is Bebo Norman.

The song currently playing on the soundtrack of my life is "A Page is Turned." The song is not so much fitting for the implications of romance referred to in the song (sadly, it seems I need more than two chances), but for the reminder that God is always in the business of redemption. I love the promise that someday, my day will come.

A Page Is Turned

A page is turned by the wind to a boy in curly grin
With a world to conquer at the age of ten
But as history unfolds and the storybook is told
He finds salvation but not at the hands of man
And the God of second chance
Picked him up and He let him dance
Through a world that is not kind A
nd all this time, preparing him, the one
To hold him up when he comes undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And now a man, here you stand
Your day has come

A page is turned in this world to reveal a little girl
With a heart that's bigger, as it is unfurled
By the language in her soul, that's teaching her to grow
With a careful cover of love that will not fail
And the God of second chance
Picked her up and He let her dance
Through a world that isn't kind
And all this time, preparing her the one
To hold her up when she comes undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And grown up tall, here you are
Your day has come

Beneath the air of autumn, she took him by his hand
And warm within the ardor, she took his heart instead
And high upon the mountain, he asked her for her hand
Just for her hand
A page is turned in this life, he's making her his wife
And there is no secret to the source of this much life
When the grace that falls like rain is washing them again
Just a chance to somehow rise above this land
Where the God of second chance
Will pick them up and he'll let them dance
Through a world that is not kind
And all this time, they're sharing with the one
That holds them up when they come undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And once again, here you stand
And once again, here you stand
Your day has come

One Year Ago...

Today marks the one year anniversary of my return to work following my head injury. Or, to be more accurate, the one year anniversary of my successful return to work following my head injury. I had made several previous attempts. There was a time in the not-so-distant past when I didn't understand ritual and tradition. I didn't care for special occasions. Now, I appreciate milestones for the opportunity they give us to stop, step back, and celebrate the progress we've made.

One year ago, my neurologist told me, "It's really too early for you to return to work, but let's try it anyway. With all the holidays, you'll have plenty of built in breaks. And if we find out that you can't do this job anymore, then we'll work on plan B."

One year ago, I was so afraid my life was going to have to turn to plan B. My confidence was pretty shot down. The person I had always been had been kidnapped by this person whose frailties and limitations I didn't understand. I wasn't sure that I would be able to return to work so the independence I had always valued seemed to be a misdirected goal. And yet, one year later, I'm finally starting to see how God is using this new normal for His good.

Instead, this past weekend at church, I went up front during the prayer time to thank God for second chances. A second chance at a job I knew I'd enjoy. A second chance for my book. And maybe, a second chance for my heart.

It's Official.

It's official.

This week, WaterBrook/Random House reverted rights back to me for Generation Ex. It's a bittersweet experience. Since March when GE first went out of stock, I've been working with WaterBrook to either publish a small 3rd printing to support the promotions I was being asked to do, or revert rights. I hope that this feeling is the closest I come to experience divorce myself. I'm relieved that a decision has been made, but I wish it would have been different.

God's timing is ironic. The After Eve conference offered a significant boost to my confidence that God was not done using me or this message.

The good news is, I have an agent and a few interested publishers already.

As my agent and I begin the shopping process, I ask that you would remember this project in your prayers. I ask especially for direction and protection for all involved parties. I don't think it was an "accident" that I sustained such a serious injury just prior to Generation Ex releasing and I am humbly aware of how standing up for truth can make me a target of the Enemy.

Finally, I am updating my proposal and preparing materials for my agent. If you have a personal story or endorsement to offer, or any suggestions for how this book can be improved, I would love to hear from you or anyone else to whom you pass on this message.

Please email your thoughts and suggestions to generationexjen@aol.com.

Many thanks to you all.

Birthday Boy!

Happy 2nd Birthday, CJ!

Much love from your godmother,

Aunt Jen

Dear Reader/Zondervan Book Club

Okay, so it's probably no surprise that I'm a reader. My bedroom includes stacks and stacks of books I want to read, and I usually find myself somewhere in several books all at once. About a year ago, I discovered a great little service, DearReader.com.

Suzanne, the founder, selects a book each week (there are several genres to choose from). Once you sign up, she'll send you a 5-minute portion via email each morning. By the end of the week, you'll have sampled 2-3 chapters and will have a pretty good idea of you want to keep going. If so, you can click on a link to either borrow it from your local library or purchase it. In addition to the excerpt, her emails often also include promotions to win new books and other fun stuff.

Our team at Zondervan has partnered with Suzanne to offer The Breakfast Club. It works the same way, except that all the sampled books are published by Zondervan (shameless, I know!)

After Eve Recap

I'm back and mostly sleep recovered from my trip to DC. Wow...what a great event. Thanks to all who were praying and offering well wishes for my session.

As it turned out, the session went far beyond what I could have imagined. I've done speaking gigs in the past, but with only 60-90 minutes, it's not realistic to give more than an informational overview. With three hours at After Eve, I was able to give participants time to engage as well as learn. For each of the nine effects described in my book, I included an activity or discussion questions to give attendees time to process and personalize that effect in their lives. I learned how to include music clips in my PowerPoint, which not only allowed for an appropriate song to play during the work time, but it also helped me track time.

The most amazing aspect of the whole thing to me was watching these women go from nervous strangers to vulnerable fellow travelers. Somewhere around the 90 minute-mark, something happened, and the trust we needed to really dig in was there. Tears were followed by laughter, shared concerns were affirmed as the group brainstormed solutions together. And after our three hours were up, I stuck around for another 40 minutes to keep talking with these precious women. I'm quite certain I got as much out of the seminar as anyone else there.

So a heartfelt shoutout to the red-eye crew, I'm gonna get myself a spa day in honor of you!

After Eve

Thanks to my friend, Rich Hurst, I'm back in the speaking saddle.

I leave in a few hours for DC, where I will be presenting a three-hour intensive at the After Eve Conference. After Eve is a new conference for 18-35 year old women. From the website:

This is a conference by young women for young women. We believe there are many out there thirsting for truth and facing challenges in their lives - just as we are...we want to bring them a fluff-free conference that deals with relevant matters and challenges them to a deeper walk with Christ through living by the Word.

I've wanted to visit the host church, McLean Bible Church, in McLean, Virginia for some time. I'm grateful for this opportunity to check it out Sunday morning. My employer is a sponsor for the event, so I'll be toggling both hats while I'm there.

In a very cool case of God's planning, my trip aligns with that of Gary Thomas, my friend and now one of the authors I'm paid to promote. You can be sure I'll be announcing that here at a later time. In the meantime, Gary and I will have time to meet up on Friday.

I haven't been to DC since I was a kid, so I'm hoping for an opportunity to tour the city. My friends, "the family down the street," have gotten me hooked on The West Wing, so I have a new appreciation for our political system.

I'd appreciate your prayers for safe travel for my team and all those coming in from around the company. And I specifically covet your prayers that the sessions presented (including mine) will be conduits through which God's transforming love and presence will be felt.

US News & Worlds Report on "Between Two Worlds"

An interview with Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds:

On the Bookshelf: For kids, no 'good' divorces
Posted 9/26/05
By Katy Kelly

For divorced parents trying to minimize the effect on their children, this news is bad. Author Elizabeth Marquardt's new groundbreaking national study of adult children of divorce (ages 18–35) concludes that there is no such thing as a "good" divorce. While good splits are better than bitter ones are, the best divorces still leave children with lasting inner conflict, says Marquardt, a Chicago-based affiliate scholar at the nonpartisan Institute for American Values in New York City and herself a child of a good divorce. Her study makes her case in the just published Between Two Worlds (Crown, $24.95).

Q: Much has been written about the low impact of "good" divorce. Your study says otherwise.

A: Good divorce is a theory, not a fact. The grown children of divorce will tell you there is no such thing as a "good" divorce. Despite parental love and good intentions, divorce creates insurmountable problems for a child.

Q: How so?

A: The parents can both be good people, but they are different. In a marriage, it's the job of the parents to make sense out of their two worlds. Divorced parents have two different versions of truth. The child sees these worlds as polar opposites. The children grow up traveling between two worlds. They start to feel like a different person with each parent. It really hits the child in their identity formation. With divorce, all of a sudden the child has to say: "Who am I?" and "How do I make sense of this?" This is a huge developmental task that is handed to children of divorce that is not part the lives of children of intact families.

Q: Eventually we all have to answer those questions.

A: Yes, but it happens on the divorce timeline, not on the timeline of the child's own needs.

Q: Shouldn't it comfort a child when both parents attend the child's games and school events?

A: In a "good" divorce, parents get to get together on the soccer field, but because the only connection is the child, that's hard. It's the child alone who maintains these two relationships. They are the only common link to both worlds. That's a big job. It makes them self-conscious. It makes them feel they have to watch both sides. Even surrounded by people, they feel much more isolated.

Q: Other fallout?

A: There's a lot of loss that comes with divorce. There is this theme of loneliness. Children of divorce are three times more likely to say, "I was alone a lot as a child." It makes them feel grown up too soon, like little adults. It makes them guarded and can make them secretive. These are the kinds of things that make it really hard to be honest with themselves–from being their honest true self with the person they are most intimate with–their spouse. These are huge losses that impact their spiritual lives. Most are much less likely to be religious than those from intact families, but others look to God as the father they never had in real life.

The cost can be in their relationship with the parent. One huge finding: Only one third of children of divorce say they went to one or both parents for comfort. Children of divorce are more likely to say they went to peers or handled it alone.

Q: If one is settled on getting a divorce, is there a better time in the child's life to do it?

A:I don't find that there is, but the earlier you do it the more complicated it is for the child.

Q: Your advice?

A: Two thirds of divorces end low-conflict marriages. Most are not these abusive, fighting like cats and dogs marriages. People just want out. For parents who are married and have considered divorce–and who hasn't?–it might be the midlife blahs or boredom. But this good divorce talk is incredibly misleading. We hear the stories about how many kids end up brutally damaged by awful divorces and then hear this good divorce thought: Your child will be fine. But you don't want to just prevent awful damage in your child. You want them to thrive.

Q: So right the marriage at any cost?

A: No. With chronic infidelity, abuse, addictions, thank God we have divorce. These marriages have to end, but it's not easy. But for low-conflict marriages there are great resources, including two on the Web: smartmarriages.com and the marriage-friendly therapist.com

McManus on Marquardt

Mike McManus, founder of Marriage Savers, wrote this article on Elizabeth Marquardt's new book, Between Two Worlds for his Ethics and Religion column.

btw...thanks to Crown for my copy. It arrived yesterday!

Between Two Worlds
October 19, 2005

One quarter of adults, aged 18-35, lived through the divorce of their parents. It is ashattering experience according to an powerful new book, "Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce" by Elizabeth Marquardt.

When Elizabeth was aged seven, climbing a jungle gym, she heard a mother say toanother, "Kids with divorced parents are kicked back and forth like a footfall." The image grabbed her because that's what her life was like after age three when her parents divorced.

When she quoted the woman to her father, he turned a purplish red and sputtered that the image did not apply to her, because both he and her mother loved her very much. She saw how sad each were to say goodbye at the airport.

But she felt like the football flying "too high, too free" belonging "neither to the place it left nor to the place it was going."

Children of divorce are three times as likely to be expelled from school or to becomepregnant as teenagers as those from intact parents and are five times as apt to live in poverty.

But what about the much larger numbers of children of divorce who seem to be "fine?"

The assumption of many therapists and parents is that if divorcing parents have a "good divorce" in which they do not battle over custody, are civil when in the same room and stick to agreements on visitation and child support that their children will do well.

"In the first ever study of the inner lives of grown children of divorce, there is no such thing as a `good divorce.' It requires children to grow up between two worlds, between parents with vastly different beliefs," asserts Ms. Marquardt.

The study compared 750 Generation X adults of divorced parents with 750 who grew up in intact homes. The differences are stark. Two-thirds of children of divorce who stay in contact with both parents (and many do not) say they felt like they grew up in two families, not one, which creates "endless and often painful complications for a child."

For example, Elizabeth's father and mother both remarried. Her mother and stepfather were hippies who moved into a rented four room tenant farmer's house without indoor plumbing and took showers with a garden hose. Her father worked by day and went to law school at night. Elizabeth flew alone to visit him from age five. Eventually both parents divorced again, and her stepfather, whom she loved, committed suicide.

Fully 44 percent of children of divorce said "I was alone a lot as a child" vs. only 14percent of those in intact families - a three-fold difference. Melissa, one of 71 adult children of divorce interviewed, said that while in high school her mother was frequently absent - at work or on dates or spending the night with boyfriends.

When Daniel's father left his mother to move in with another woman, his mother wasdevastated. Daniel learned not to go to her when he felt sad or scared, because she would become overwhelmed with guilt, call herself a bad mother, and he'd have to comfort her!

A fifth of young adult children of divorce agree that "I love my mother, but do not respect her," triple that of those from intact homes. A quarter of young adults from divorced homes disagree with the assertion, "My father clearly taught me the difference between right and wrong." That compares with just 3 percent of those from intact homes. If the study had included the many children totally abandoned by divorced dads, the ratio would have been much worse.

Because the moral guidelines from each parent conflicted, children "had to create their own values and find within themselves the courage and capacity to trust their own judgment," writes Judith Wallerstein in a Foreword. As one young man put it, "I had to become my own parent."

What are the lessons of "Between Two Worlds?"

First, two-thirds of those who divorce who are in low-conflict marriages, should workharder to save their marriages, or at least wait until children are grown before divorcing. Only a third of the divorced said that they and ex-spouses tried to save the marriage.

Second, therapists who often recommend divorce and clergy who acquiesce in it - must become voices for the children urging parents to be more responsible.

Finally, this book is must reading for the millions of divorced parents or who areconsidering it, for the judges who always grant divorce when only one person asks for it, and by state legislators who should consider replacing "No Fault Divorce" (Unilateral Divorce) with "Mutual Consent Divorce."

"Because of You" video

Kelly Clarkson's video for "Because of You" is a powerful visual testament to the legacy of divorce.