5 good books: Marriage memoir by Ken and Joni Eareckson Tada, wrestling with …

‘Joni Ken: An Untold Love Story,’€ by Ken Tada and Joni Eareckson Tada, with Larry Libby. 

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama – His new wife was everything Ken Tada had ever dreamed of: beautiful, talented, kind, respected around the world for her work on behalf of disabled people. But Joni Eareckson Tada is also really, truly paralyzed from her shoulders down.

Joni’s total helplessness was a fact of life that the newly married Ken Tada had to deal with – alone – on their honeymoon trip in ways far more personal than he’d imagined, despite dating her for two years. Helping someone with a bowel routine is not romantic. It’s not sexy. There’s nothing about it but work. 

“Joni Ken: An Untold Love Story,” unfolds an incredibly brave, tastefully intimate and unflinchingly honest book about two broken people creating a solid marriage and supporting each other’s developing ministries. This marriage staggers, but withstands, the heavy weights of Joni’s debilitating handicap and Ken’s bouts of depression – all under the glare of Joni’s fame through her work with the organization Joni Friends.

The book doesn’t evade the toll those challenges take on both of them, but neither does it skimp on sharing how this husband and wife — through prayer, commitment, faith, determination and the remembrance of a sense of humor — have managed to create something beautiful out of what could have been a mess.

‘Encouraged by Brenda Ladun 

Here are four more books worth considering for an early springtime read:

“Encouraged: An Inspiring Journey with Real-Life Stories of Hope” is written by Brenda Ladun, a two-time cancer survivor and also an award-winning ABC news anchor based in Birmingham, Ala.

Filled with sisterly confidences about meeting trouble and finding ways to get through it based on scripture and faith, the book is linked to short videos via QR codes that punctuate the chapters. Ladun has also released a DVD with the book, making it a good choice for use with small groups.

‘The Question That Never Goes Away: Why’ by Philip Yancey 

“The Question That Never Goes Away: Why,” by Philip Yancey, continues the conversation this respected Christian author began with his 1977 best-seller, “Where Is God when It Hurts?”

Using the insights of a journalist’s travels around the world, Yancey weaves stories of people who have survived the unthinkable – the shootings at New Town, tsunami, war – into a net that offers handholds for others looking to climb out of profound depths.

What makes the book work, beyond Yancey’s skilled reporting and writing skills, is that he writes from a personal place of pain, attempting to answer the question that’s haunted him ever since he was a kid and his would-be missionary father died from polio. “Pain,” Yancey writes, “plays as a kind of background static to many lives.” This book looks at the answers some – from the mother of a child killed by a drunk driver to the father of a student shot at New Town — have found to the question of “What is God up to?”

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‘In the Shadow of the Buddha’ by Matteo Pistono ,” by Matteo Pistono, takes one man’s personal faith journey into the realm of high-stakes human rights espionage in the service of bringing justice and religious freedom to Tibet. Pistono, formerly a staffer on American political campaigns, trips into the work of a lifetime when he takes what he thinks will be a personal pilgrimage to visit sites in the Himalayas associated with the Buddhist holy man, Terton Sogyal. That personal trip turned into 10 years of Pistono’s undercover work to document human rights abuses and to get those reports to the West.

Pistono has also founded Nekorpa.org, a foundation working to protect sacred pilgrimage sites around the world. Part a personal story of one man’s spiritual awakening, the book is also a back-country survey of life, both religious and political, on the roof of the world.

‘Town of Empty Rooms’ by Karen E. Bender 

“A Town of Empty Rooms,” by Karen E. Bender, looks at the monumental movements of a small Southern town that shifts to make room for a new Jewish family. Compellingly structured, the novel sweeps the readers into the deliberations of the synagogue’s board as it considers firing an odd, young rabbi, and it gives the reader a seat on the school bleachers when that same rabbi holds his own in front of a crowd determined to make sure their town and their school system remain identifiably Christian.

This is a tough novel that also, finally, resonates with the distant rumble of hope and love without ever once surrendering to a sappy, thoughtless confidence. It compresses a gaggle of disparate and quietly desperate people into the sack of one community and then records how they find, just barely, room to breathe and ways to connect.

“There were so many small, mysterious ways to try to break through yourself, to try to know and love another,” the main character Serena realizes at the end. “Perhaps they were all simply praying to know another person, to take a step from the empty room that contained their own roaring, to step out of their own room for the rare privilege of meeting someone else.”

The video, below, is the interview from Zondervan press with Ken and Joni Eareckson Tada about what they hope their joint memoir can do to help other husbands and wives.