How do you hope this book brings healing and refreshment to marriages?
I hope How the Light Gets In brings healing and refreshment to marriages by helping them see they are worthy of love, just as they are. Insecurity can erect defenses in marriage, but once we’re aware that Jesus loves us where we are, it pushes us toward that love; and that understanding of love helps us love each other perfectly, the way it was meant to be since the beginning of time.
What is one thing you learned about yourself through writing this book?
Ruth, at the beginning of the story, has these defenses in place to protect her heart. Only once she steps into her identity as a beloved daughter of God can she find healing and wholeness. I didn’t know I had erected defenses around my own heart as well until this novel brought them to light. I am so grateful for the ability to understand my own heart by processing life and love through my characters.
Visit Jolina Petersheim’s author page:
How The Light Gets In
Jolina Petersheim
Tyndale House
After a Great Loss, How Do You Put The Past Behind You?
When Ruth Neufeld’s husband and father-in-law are killed working for a relief organization overseas, she travels to Wisconsin with her young daughters and mother-in-law Mabel to bury her husband. She hopes the Mennonite community will be a quiet place to grieve and piece together next steps.
Ruth and her family are welcomed by Elam, her husband’s cousin, who invites them to stay at his cranberry farm through the harvest. Sifting through fields of berries and memories of a marriage that was broken long before her husband died, Ruth finds solace in the beauty of the land and healing through hard work and budding friendship. She also encounters the possibility of new love with Elam, whose gentle encouragement awakens hopes and dreams she thought she’d lost forever.
But an unexpected twist threatens to unseat the happy ending Ruth is about to write for herself. On the precipice of a fresh start and a new marriage, Ruth must make an impossible decision: which path to choose if her husband isn’t dead after all.