Kent was born and raised in the Boston area and Cape Cod. The first Spirit-filled Christian he encountered that he could take seriously was his high school creative writing teacher, who “prayed him into the Kingdom” when she discovered through his teen-aged writing that he was into some dark stuff. Kent joined the Navy, where he accepted Christ in 1978 at a Christian coffee house near his duty station. He slowly grew to take the Bible seriously intellectually, spiritually, and in his life-style. The indwelling Holy Spirit first became noticeable when he found that he could now understand the King James Bible and more of Shakespeare, both of which had been almost incomprehensible to him in high school the previous year.
A couple years later, Kent experienced empowering from the Holy Spirit for gifts of service. The Lord gave him a brief mild electrical sensation and told him, “This is a witness between you and Me, that I am in control.” This seemed just fine. Around the same time, Kent began attending Calvary Chapel El Centro, because he liked the Biblically balanced approach Calvary had to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which, during the quaint days of 1979, often seemed to be the worst thing dividing Bible believers. Kent married his wife Dianne there in 1980, and believed that God had called them to pastoral ministry. This later proved not to be so, except inasmuch as God made Kent to be a teacher and author who has a pastoral heart for his students and readers.
Kent and Dianne settled in Albuquerque in 1982, hoping to be involved in the ministry of a then-fledgling Calvary Chapel of Albuquerque. Kent had trouble finding steady work, and Dianne’s allergies worsened, however. After much prayer, job-seeking, and biblical counseling, Kent finally landed a good job at Intel in early 1985. Dianne’s health improved and they led an inherited home fellowship until 1988. All during this time, Kent experienced the occasional mild electrical sensation, and remembered that God was in control. In January of 1987, Dianne gave birth to their daughter, Shannyn Rae.
Kent’s last teaching at the home fellowship in Albuquerque was through Jude, on “staying off the spiritual casualty list.” Just after Kent and his family moved to Rio Rancho in 1988, the three other married couples of that home group each underwent ugly divorces. Most of the people left the Faith altogether. Kent and Dianne had fiercely erased the word divorce from their vocabulary from the start, and now redoubled the intensity of their commitment. They still felt like spiritual refugees. Although they continued in the Faith, Kent lost any real passion for teaching the Bible for a long time. The Lord redirected him into researching and writing what would eventually become The Windows of Heaven novel series. Things also went extremely well for Kent at Intel.
In 1989, Kent’s “electrical sensations” grew in frequency and intensity. By summer, he was having hundreds of clonic-tonic seizure jolts a day and had to see a neurologist. By late August, the seizures were under partial control with medication. Kent first met Pastor Robert Hall that year on a rainy Sunday morning in late August, after riding his bike to the tiny fellowship of what would soon grow into Calvary Chapel of Rio Rancho. Dianne’s allergies to perfumes were acting up and she did not want to risk setting them off that morning.
Kent’s condition worsened, until he was disabled in 1996. Dianne worked as a teacher and nurse at a small Christian school, and cared for Kent as his seizure disorders hit the speech centers of his brain, and caused partial motor loss on his right side. During this time, he developed an intense and surprisingly disciplined program of self-education in history to compliment his Bible studies. Pastor Hall even recommended that Kent write a church history book for on-the-job-trained pastors. The result went to publication in 2002 as One Faith—Many Transitions: Worldviews in Church History.
Meanwhile, Dianne’s allergies weakened her immune system until she acquired a persistent colonizing lung infection by 1999. The Lord gave Kent many strategies to fight past his seizure, sensory, and speech difficulties. He home schooled Shannyn from 7th through 10th grades, while Dianne continued to work at the school by taking prednisone indefinitely to keep breathing. Nothing else worked for her.
From 2000 to 2002, Kent and Dianne experienced a role reversal as to which was the caregiver. A combination of the colonizing infection and the increasing doses of steroids destroyed Dianne’s adrenal glands, pancreas, and immune system. She finally needed immuno-globulin infusions, but had anaphylactic shock reactions to them—forcing her to take more of the steroid that had helped destroy her immune system to begin with. It was medical “Catch-22.” By 2003, it was clear that Dianne had only about 5 years to live. Years of prayers seemed fruitless for both Kent and Dianne, as Shannyn entered her teen years; the only driver in the family, once Dianne became bedridden. The sense of helpless exhaustion was molasses-speed hell for Kent. Then it got really bad.
In an effort to eliminate his two worst medications and clear his head some, Kent tried a drug in 2004 designed to fight both seizures and nerve pain. The result was disastrous—the more so because Kent tried to pray hard over such decisions. Something popped in his head, magnifying his sensory overload and further damaging his already impaired ability to process speech and to read. Pastor Hall kindly kept Kent on staff, though he could do little more than edit, write, and review books—all at a tediously slow rate because of the effort it took him to process language. Worship was a nightmare, because he could only get out every 4th word or so to keep pace. He knew that “God understood,” but that really wasn’t the point. Kent’s responsibilities as a husband were no less pressing simply because Dianne “understood.” Nor were his duties as a father, because he had a kind daughter.
Kent had to devote his full attention to Dianne, and except for in a brief partial improvement in 2006-2007, did little else. He taught and spoke (ironically) occasionally, but only from material that he had already written or studied before his brain became so impaired. Dianne went home to the Lord in 2008, and Kent’s seizure disorder spiraled downward throughout 2009. Kent said, “Lord, if this is how it will be from here out, take me home. I don’t want to play anymore. I’m useless to these people, and I’m useless to you. How about an Indian Summer?”
Over a year after Dianne passed, the Lord flipped a switch in Kent’s brain. He went from having 4 to 8 seizures a day to having only 2 to 4 a week. By the end of January 2010, Kent knew that something radical had shifted. The rate of brain and nerve healing now outpaced the rate of new brain damage from seizure activity for the first time in almost 20 years. In July, Kent tossed away the cane he had used for 17 years. In October, he was back at the gym lifting weights and swimming laps. The “thorn in the flesh—the messenger of Satan—still buffets” him but at a greatly reduced rate. It’s not the same. Speaking, reading, and writing—the things that once came so easily—are now an effort, but a joyful one. Kent changed nothing in his diet or prayer life (except for the “Indian Summer prayer—which was hardly a stellar example of faith in action).
Today, Kent writes teaching booklets at request from the pastors and helps at Holy Fire book store. He is slowly working on a 5th novel sequel to The Windows of Heaven. The Lord still has him speak occasionally, only now there is a sense that someone old is becoming a bit younger—almost like a tiny redemptive foretaste of the renewal to come, or perhaps an Indian Summer before a brief winter, followed by a resurrection.
1. What are some of your hobbies?
I’m a major history geek, and love ships, trains, and odd-ball flying machines like Zeppelins and Catalina flying boats.
2. What is your favorite book in the Bible?
Genesis
3. What is your favorite Bible verse and why?
Hebrews 11:1 –“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
The word substance here is hypostasis, a Greek compound word that can be translated as “the underlying stuff that holds things up” (hypo = under and stasis is where we get the words static and state, as in “a state of being” from; like “matter can exist in a solid state, liquid state, or gaseous state” etc.). It is one of the rare places in Scripture where the word faith is used in its epistemological or “worldview mechanics” sense. Faith sets the grid through which every one views reality. Not necessarily “faith in God,” but everyone exercises faith in something—even if they really hate using the word faith to describe that. The cool thing is that this verse is just as true for the unbeliever as it is for the believer—the unbeliever simply invests their faith in a different object and hopes for a different ultimate reality than we hope for. (No joy there, pal.) This verse is the “great equalizer” that takes down the proud and elevates the humble. It is a major key to an effective apologetic for the Faith in the 21st century and to “casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God,” and for “bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ,” in this generation. Why? Because it exposes the false perception so prevalent today that “faith and reason are at war.” Once we can expose the faith-assumptions that lay beneath the Enemy’s main vanguard arrayed against God’s people today—demonic dehumanizing super-weapons like determinism, reductionism, utilitarianism, and minimalism—we can get completely out of the “fortress mentality” that has gripped the church for over a century and go on the offensive. Jesus said of the church that “the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Gates are defensive. The implication here is that we should be on the offensive. Hebrews 11:1 reveals a basic truth about the human condition that a good military tactician will exploit. But to do so, we must not only reason competently in the Scriptures but from the Scriptures into whatever the world throws at us. That inevitably means speaking and thinking in two languages. The bad news is that most believers don’t even know (or want to know) what those “enemy super-weapons” are, what they mean, how they attack the foundations of their lives every single day, nor how Satan uses them tactically to further his time-tested strategy of using “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” to destroy us.
This is why I put Hebrews 11:1 on every one of my books that I sign for someone. It’s a big part of what God has made me about .
4. What is your best childhood memory?
Going out with my grandfather and uncle on my grandfather’s 32-ft. Bevans cabin cruiser over the horizon, so that no land was visible in any direction. (It had a flying bridge over the wheel house, an rotating angler’s chair over the stern boards, and mahogany wood trim. In the forward cabin was a galley, sleeping quarters, and bathroom. Aft, were twin 8-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engines with twin shafts and screws—man could that baby throw a rooster tail!) Sometimes the weather in New England shifts suddenly, bringing in storms called “Nor’easters” where the waves would reach as high as the boat’s flying bridge (over 12 feet). Visibility would drop to less than a boat-length, and the waves were like hills of water on all sides that we had to climb and descend at a speed of about 3 to 5 knots. In the wave troughs it was like walls of water all around you, only at the crest could we see where we were going. I never felt fear at such times because I knew my Grandfather had been in navy for some 30 years, and had lived through typhoons and World War 2—and he was in command. He would never deliberately take us into such weather, but this was the days before reliable satellite weather telemetry, and the best predictions were often wrong. We all had to keep watch because rocks and jetties could appear out of nowhere in the fog. Other times, in clear skies, we would see whales and strange creatures—like the “ocean sunfish,” which is like a giant fish head, 8 feet by 8 feet, with a huge dorsal fin and 2 stabilizing ventral fins like a giant angel fish, and a stubby tail fin.
I learned to love and respect the ocean. It was deep, sometimes dark, but always alive. As a Christian, I can look back on my lack of fear during some pretty terrifying seas for such a small craft because I knew Grampy had seen it all before and knew what to do. If Grampy knew how to deal with those things, then surely the Lord—who is really in control—hasn’t abandoned ship and left us to fend for ou