Fighting for Your Marriage While Separated

Linda Rooks’ book, Fighting for Your Marriage While Separated, is a winner of the Golden Scroll Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award in 2019.  Fighting for Your Marriage While Separated guides a person step-by-step through the complexities of a separation. Dispelling the assumption that a separation will inevitably end in divorce, Rooks shares practical insights, biblical wisdom, true stories of reconciled marriages, and her own reconciliation story after a three-year marital separation. Through Scripture-based truth, practical wisdom gained from eleven years of ministry to marriages in crisis, and her own personal experience, Rooks demonstrates there is hope for reconciliation even when fighting for your marriage alone.

Here a book review by Rev. Dr. Michael Philliber, reprinted by permission:

It’s not just a book about restoring a marriage where there is presently a separation. As important as that is this tiny manual is far bigger than that. Linda W. Rooks, author, Resource Member on the Troubled Marriages Team of the Association of Marriage and Family Ministries (AMFM), and leader of a marriage reconciliation ministry in Central Florida, has given a hopeful hand to many whose marriages are disarrayed and desperate in her 176 page paperback, “Fighting for Your Marriage While Separated: A Practical Guide for the Brokenhearted.” Though this little guide has marital separations in mind, much of the material applies to those whose spouses are shackled to addiction, who are abusive, or adulterous. But it is also useful for those who simply desire their marriages to be healthier and never fall off the cliff.

Rooks takes her readers, men and women, through the various stages and traps that accompany a limping or broken marriage. She deciphers the ploys a “remaining” spouse will be tempted to play, the maneuvers the leaving person may likely employ, as well as the traps that await both parties if they’re not watchful. The author conducts us through the various parts of the path: from separation, through present relationship, to friendship, and then potential reconciliation. But she does this discerningly and wisely, such as, forgiveness and trust are not identical, and so forth. Many of her categories are meaningful, like discussing those who are overbearing in a marriage, and those who are passive; or the difference between letting go and giving up. All her material is buttressed by plentiful real-life examples and personal stories. What adds muscle to the volume is that Rooks and her husband walked through this vale of tears in their own three-year separation many years back and have surfaced on the other side.

Fighting for Your Marriage While Separated should be in the libraries of every Christian minister and counselor. But those who are married, divorced, separated, or thinking about getting married will find valuable resources between these covers. It is easy to read, and substantive. Not only do I highly recommend the book, I have just handed off my copy to a person whose marriage is in serious trouble because I earnestly think they will find sustenance and support from its pages.

My thanks to New Growth Press who willingly handed me a copy of this volume at our denomination’s General Assembly in June 2019, when I asked for it. They laid down no stipulations. Therefore, the evaluations presented herein are mine, freely made and freely given.

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Linda Rooks, Author

Linda W. Rooks has a ministry of hope for those in broken marriages. Her award winning book, Fighting for Your Marriage while Separated, and her earlier book, Broken Heart on Hold, Surviving Separation walk with those in the midst of marital breakdown to bring hope and practical guidance to those desiring reconciliation. Linda writes for both adults and children, and her stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications including Chicken Soup for the Soul, Focus on the Family, HomeLife, and Today’s Christian Woman. Linda has participated in numerous radio and television interviews across the North American continent. She and her husband reside in Central Florida and thank God for the many reconciled marriages they witness through their ministry and the classes they lead.