Beloved Readers,
Despite that there is no shortage of hard work, stress, and things to be grieved or anxious over in life, we still fall in love. How beautiful it is when we experience the glorious, euphoric kind of love that causes us to care more about another person than ourselves. That kind of love is good and kind and sacrificial—a perfect love. I have fallen in love many times, and the people at the top of that list are my husband, each of my sons, my daughters-in-law, and my grandchildren.
Each time love worked its way into my mind, heart, and soul, I was confident it could see us through anything. After all, what’s more powerful than perfect love? The Word says God is love (1 John 4:8).
Yet my family began 2016 with heartache. (If you’d like to understand more about that, click here.) My two daughters-in-law were each expecting a baby girl two weeks apart. My grandsons from those families, who were almost two years old then, are less than six months apart in age. The whole family looked forward to seeing that cousin bond form again between these new granddaughters of mine. Our family celebrations of this anticipated miracle were strong and exhilarating.
Our bubbling joy had been going on for twenty weeks when we got the news that something was wrong. Our granddaughter had a form of lethal skeletal dysplasia and she could never live outside the womb. We lost her at 20 weeks.
The ensuing emotions were difficult to navigate. Each of us had experienced loss before, but never like this. A child, even before birth, carries a lifetime of hope.
Before this tragedy, we as a family frequently visited one another’s homes, called, texted, arranged gatherings. We vacationed together almost every year for nearly a decade, so we knew how to embrace the best and worst in each other and still come out strong. Or so we thought.
But this past winter, stress piled on, and our family didn’t get through it in perfect harmony. We kept trying to give one another our best, but our best was lacking at times.
Time dragged its feet. Each day seemed like a week, and we felt as if we were caught in the middle of a long, dark winter. Restrained disagreements frayed the edges of all we held dear.
And in the midst of all this, my other daughter-in-law was still expecting her healthy baby girl.
Many times in life, grievous and joyous things happen at the same time. How do we grieve loss when a new life is on its way? And how can we celebrate when death has taken a new life?
We do it with frailty and with strength. We do it with missteps and with faith. We do it with our imperfect love, because even when we’re relying on God’s perfect love to flow through us, imperfect love is all we have to offer one another.
My newest novel isn’t about this kind of grief and loss. But while I was writing Fraying at the Edge, we had our own kind of fraying happening, and the book is dedicated to Iris Summer Woodsmall, who went to heaven on January 15, 2016.
Although no one has perfect love to share, it’s more than enough when mixed with patience and perseverance.
Spoiler alert!
If you haven’t read Ties That Bind, the award winning, best-selling first book in the Amish of Summer Grove series, please don’t read any further!
Ties That Bind is available at your local bookstore. To order from Amazon, click here.
Fraying at the Edge
Book two in the Amish of Summer Grove series
Family, community, faith, and love. These quilt blocks sewn together made Ariana’s beautiful life.
When they are pulled to pieces, will anything familiar remain?
The Old Order Amish life Ariana Brenneman loved vanished virtually overnight with the discovery that she was switched at birth twenty years ago. Now she’s immersed in the “Englisch” world, getting to know her mother, and under the authority of her biological father, an atheist intellectual with resolute plans to expand Ariana’s worldview. Only Quill Schlabach, a childhood friend living "Englisch," can help steady Ariana’s tilting ground between the two worlds, but can she trust him after so many betrayals?
At the same time, Skylar Nash is forced to choose rehab or spend several months with her true relatives, the large Brenneman family and their seemingly backward life of no electricity, no technology, and no fun. What the young woman can’t leave behind is her addiction to illegal prescription drugs and deep emptiness from the belief that she doesn’t belong in either family.
New ties are binding Ariana and Skylar to the lives they were meant to have. Can they gain the wisdom and strength they’ll need to follow the threads into unexpected futures?
To read the first chapter of Fraying at the Edge, click here.
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Ten-year anniversary!
This is my ten-year anniversary with WaterBrook Press, an imprint of Random House. I know I've expressed this before, but you, my wonderful reader friends, have been the best at helping me get the word out to others about each new book release. There is no way for me to thank you enough for that!
If you have a few moments to help get the word out again, I would greatly appreciate it, and I’ve prepared two simple ways you can do that.
To help make it fun and as a thank-you for your time and effort, I’m offering a chance to win an autographed copy of Ties That Bind and Fraying at the Edge, as well as an Amish-made quilt. One participant will get all three items.
Specific, easy-to-follow how-to info is on my blog.