Advance praise for
How the Light Gets In
“How the Light Gets In is infused with hope and threaded with love, a story that asks the big questions: what makes us whole, and how do we find our worth? With the provocative biblical story of Ruth as inspiration, Petersheim brings alive modern-day characters struggling with both marriage and motherhood. Sometimes we use the words forgiveness, redemption, and love without understanding their depths, but Petersheim digs deep to portray the cost and worth of these values. A novel both penetrating and surprising—don’t miss it!”
PATTI CALLAHAN HENRY, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookshop at Water’s End
“I love how Jolina Petersheim translates timeless truths into can’t-put-down fiction. This story’s heart-wrenching conflict had me glued to the page.”
FRANCINE RIVERS, New York Times bestselling author of The Masterpiece
“Compellingly woven by Jolina Petersheim’s capable pen, How the Light Gets In follows a trail of grief toward healing, leading to an impossible choice—what is best when every path will hurt someone? A mother’s love and a mother’s duty war with a woman’s need to feel loved and whole in a story that will stay with you long after you close the final page and leave you pondering: Which path would I take?”
LISA WINGATE, New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours
“Jolina Petersheim writes so vividly that you taste the morning coffee and smell the peat from the cranberry bog. More than this, you will feel the ache deep inside Ruth as she wrestles with the desire for something just out of her grasp. With surprising twists and powerful themes, this story will sink into your soul and give you hope.”
CHRIS FABRY, bestselling author of Under a Cloudless Sky
“Jolina Petersheim’s How the Light Gets In chronicles one woman’s experience with motherhood, a fractured marriage, piercing grief, and glimpses of new hope. The setting—a cranberry farm in a Wisconsin Mennonite community—was a new one for me, and I was pulled into its stark and rugged beauty. Petersheim’s gentle retelling of the story of Ruth will both stir and settle the hearts of her readers.”
LAUREN K. DENTON, bestselling author of The Hideaway
“An insightful and poignant modern-day retelling of the book of Ruth, How the Light Gets In will work its way into readers’ minds and stay there long after the last page. Jolina Petersheim draws the story of widowhood, finding family, and rewriting one’s own life story with great grace and gentle tenderness, once again proving herself to be a standout voice in Christian fiction.”
KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY, bestselling author of Slightly South of Simple
“Jolina Petersheim’s Ruth Neufeld is a heroine I’ll never forget—for her courage and love and forgiveness. Faced with an impossible choice, Ruth’s decision makes me believe in what it means to live out our highest selves.”
BREN MCCLAIN, award-winning author of the Okra Pick One Good Mama Bone
“As Jolina Petersheim explored the heartache of loss, the covenant of marriage, and the hope of new beginnings, I was challenged to consider whether I could have been obedient to the Lord in the same difficult circumstances. The journey to the final page was both impactful and thought-provoking. Expertly written, unpredictable, and powerful!”
BECKY WADE, award-winning author of Falling For You
“Petersheim delivers another intriguing story of love and healing. Add How the Light Gets In to your must-read list.”
RACHEL HAUCK, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding Dress
“A compelling story of love, loss, faith, and rediscovery—and of what truly matters when faced with life’s most difficult twists and turns.”
TAMERA ALEXANDER, bestselling author of With This Pledge
“In this creative retelling of the story of Ruth, Petersheim carried me along in her capable hands lovingly, gently, and then as if with glorious fireworks, she applied twists, turns, and surprises that would have O. Henry nodding in appreciation. What an exquisite and meaningful read for anyone who’s experienced the ups, downs, and unknowns of God’s will for our lives.”
NICOLE SEITZ, author of The Cagemaker and coeditor of Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy
“How the Light Gets In retells the biblical story of Ruth—but with contemporary complexities and twists. Characterized by insight and lovely prose, the story wrestles with shattered relationships, the reality of hard and imperfect choices, and redemption in the midst of pain.”
JOY JORDAN-LAKE, bestselling author of A Tangled Mercy
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Visit Jolina Petersheim online at www.jolinapetersheim.com.
TYNDALE and Tyndale’s quill logo are registered trademarks of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
How the Light Gets In
Copyright © 2019 by Jolina Petersheim. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of family and bedroom copyright © RG&B Images/Stocksy.com. All rights reserved.
Cover photograph of gold texture copyright © attitude1/Adobe Stock. All rights reserved.
Jacket photograph of cabin copyright © Sašo Tušar/Unsplash.com. All rights reserved.
Jacket photograph of fallen leaves copyright © Ethan Hoover/Unsplash.com. All rights reserved.
Jacket photograph of water copyright © Ian Keefe/Unsplash.com. All rights reserved.
Designed by Eva M. Winters
Edited by Kathryn S. Olson
Published in association with Ambassador Literary Agency, Nashville, TN.
How the Light Gets In is a work of fiction. Where real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales appear, they are used fictitiously. All other elements of the novel are drawn from the author’s imagination.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Tyndale House Publishers at [email protected], or call 1-800-323-9400.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Petersheim, Jolina, author.
Title: How the light gets in / Jolina Petersheim.
Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018037975 | ISBN 9781496434173 (hc) | ISBN 9781496402233 (sc)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Christian fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3616.E84264 H69 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037975
ISBN 978-1-4964-3457-9 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4964-0232-5 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-3458-6 (Apple)
Build: 2019-02-04 11:42:50 EPUB 3.0
To my three daughters—Miss A, Miss M, and Miss E.
May you always see how the light gets in.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part 1 Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Part 2 Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part 3 Chapter 21
A Note from the Author
About the Author
Discussion Questions
Acknowledgments
HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN, like all my novels, has been years in the making. Thoughts drop into my mind like rainwater into a bucket, until that bucket finally tips and the words pour out. Many people have helped fill that metaphorical bucket. First, I want to thank Uncle Ralph P
etersheim for sharing that newspaper article about the Wisconsin cranberry farmer who used old-fashioned equipment. That snippet laid the foundation for Elam’s livelihood and life.
I also want to thank the resilient, hardworking women of Wisconsin who taught me so much in the time I was there: Aunt Sheila Petersheim, Aunt Stacy Petersheim, Heather Petersheim, Justine Petersheim, Elisa Shaw, Hannah Petersheim, Marissa Kendhammer, Tamara Rutten, Jessica Rogers, and the late Kelly Baird. From inviting us for meals to taking walks and talking about faith, each of you has a special place in my heart.
I would like to thank Dale and Candy Toltzman for supporting our family while we lived in Wisconsin. I will never forget when you, Dale, came to the hospital and sat there for hours until Randy came out of surgery, or how you visited our farmhouse after he came home. In a short time, you transitioned from pastor to friend, and I will forever be grateful for the key part you played in my faith journey.
I am grateful for my Tyndale team, who shows this slow writer unending patience: Karen Watson, Stephanie Broene, and Kathy Olson. Thank you for pushing me to create fiction based on Truth.
Thank you, Wes Yoder, for your support and friendship. Hard to believe six years have passed since we stood in a lobby talking about Root’s Market and shoofly pie.
Thank you to Misty Adams for encouraging me to read this story aloud while sitting in a coffee shop. You are always my listener. I love you for that.
I am grateful for my parents, Beverly and Merle Miller, and my in-laws, Betty and Richard Petersheim. I value and love you more the longer I am alive.
Thank you to my daughters—Miss A, Miss M, and Miss E—for teaching me about the beauty of unconditional love, and that making memories is more important than having a clean house.
Thank you to my husband for his strength, loyalty, and love. We could never have anticipated our life story while we stood beneath that gazebo, saying our custom vows, on that Indian summer day. But I’m so glad we did it. There’s no one I would rather go through “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health” with than you. I love you more now than I did back then, and I know a lot of that is because we have walked through so much together. You are my best friend and the love of my life.
Finally, but not finally, I want to thank Jesus for revealing his love to me more during this year than any other. For showing himself faithful, for healing the broken places within me, for teaching me how to love with a more perfect love. Everything I am is because of you. I love you more now than I did when we first met, and I know a lot of that is because we have also walked through so much together. Thank you for never leaving my side.
CHAPTER 1
THE CASKETS WERE CLOSED, OF COURSE. No flowers adorned them. No flowers were even in the church, but cool morning light fell through the windows, warming the hardwood floor and pews. The Physicians International staff member who had called to break the news to Ruth had promised there’d been no suffering. From this, Ruth inferred there’d not been much of her husband’s body left to collect.
Later news articles confirmed the bombing the hospital had endured. Women and children had died; her husband and father-in-law were among the staff members killed. Ruth spent days afterward googling the bombing until her mother deemed she was obsessing over something that couldn’t be changed. It infuriated Ruth at the time, but now she saw the wisdom of her mother’s decision to turn off the Wi-Fi for ten hours each day, though the doling out of “wisdom” could have been accomplished with more tact.
Presently, seven weeks later, two-year-old Vivienne had no clue her father’s cremated remains were scattered in a plain pine box at the front of the church. She had no clue he had even died. But her six-year-old sister, Sofie, was old enough to understand. When Ruth sat on the packed sand beside her and told her the news, Sofie hadn’t cried, or even acted like she’d heard, but took a small piece of driftwood and threw it into the ocean, which the dog, Zeus, had run into the surf to fetch. However, since then, Sofie hadn’t laughed, played, or spoken in more than toneless monosyllables, and those were all to basic questions—“Are you hungry? Thirsty? Do you need a nap?”—that Ruth had asked and to which Sofie had begrudgingly replied.
Because of this, Ruth wasn’t about to let Sofie just sit there, stripping her cuticles off with her teeth while her brown eyes studied everything, as if trying to understand why her father’s death so closely resembled her Irish grandpa’s: everyone wearing black in a strange church where few congregants cried but most looked like they wanted to. Ruth, trying to distract her, dug into the tote she’d packed with the pretzels, cookies, and snack mixes they’d accumulated during yesterday’s endless flights. She’d also packed Pull-Ups and wipes, a coloring book and crayons, and a change of clothes in case the upheaval of the past few days (not to mention weeks and months) caused toddler Vi to forget she was potty-trained.
Ruth could never have anticipated needing a diaper bag at her husband’s funeral, and yet there were many things about her thirty years she could never have anticipated.
Ruth opened the zipper compartment and pulled out her iPhone. Switching it to silent, she pressed the YouTube app so Sofie could watch Paw Patrol. But then she remembered: her phone was not picking up a signal. Cell phone service was spotty in this Mennonite community in Wisconsin. There was barely running water. Late last night, after the girls finally settled enough to sleep, Ruth had stood under the farmhouse’s lime-encrusted showerhead, eager for another cathartic cry—the shower was the only place she felt safe enough to let herself feel—and discovered that the water came out as a lukewarm drizzle. It could never muffle her sobs, so she held them in until her chest hurt.
Ruth pressed the photos app and passed the phone to Sofie, allowing her to scroll through the pictures until the funeral wrapped up. Mabel glanced over as her granddaughter’s tiny index finger expertly slid over the pictures and tapped the play button to watch the short video clips interspersed throughout. Ruth wasn’t sure if her mother-in-law approved, but Ruth didn’t really care if she did. Ruth did not want to bury her husband in Wisconsin. Therefore, she already resented the land and the extended family, who were so plentiful she didn’t feel her single voice carried any weight. She wanted Chandler buried in Ireland, where she and her girls could visit him each day. And yet, was her parents’ old stone house truly her home?
The surprisingly young bishop read from the Psalms: “Der Herr ist meine Stärke und mein Schild; auf ihn hofft mein Herz, und mir ist geholfen.”
The funeral service was being conducted in both German and English. Ruth suspected that the latter translation was mainly for her benefit, since she was among the few non-Mennonites in attendance. But there was no need. The only way Ruth was going to survive the next few hours—and days, for that matter—was by blocking it all out. Otherwise, her shield of self-preservation would crack, and she doubted she could get herself back together if it did.
Ruth glanced down at her Fitbit and saw two hours had passed since she’d come into the church with her children. Her tights itched, and her eyelids felt heavy, which filled her with guilt.
How could she be fighting sleep at her husband’s funeral? But she knew this fight stemmed from acute exhaustion, and from the fact there’d been few times over the past six months she’d allowed herself to sit still, because stillness meant something wasn’t getting done, and focusing on getting something done kept her from having too much time to think.
And then, piercing the droning quiet, Ruth heard her dead husband’s voice: an audible apparition. “Hey there, girly girls,” he said. “I hope you’re being good for your mama. It’s a hot day—” Ruth was so stunned, she was unable to correlate that Chandler’s voice was not in her head but coming from her phone. Mouth dry, she glanced at her daughter’s lap. The screen framed Chandler’s familiar face. Ruth reached for it, and Sofie looked up—eyes flashing—and wrenched the phone back. All the while, the simple, now otherworldly, message continued to pla
y: “I’m looking forward to seeing you again. It won’t be long now.”
Ruth finally got the phone away and Sofie screamed, “No!”
The sound reverberated off the church’s whitewashed walls, echoing just as the a cappella hymn “The City of Light” had earlier as she and her daughters filed past the caskets.
Ruth’s cheeks burned with humiliation and grief.
In the center of her lap, just as it had been in her daughter’s, was Chandler’s face: his dark beard, his dark skin, his dark eyes, so that he blended in with both the Colombian and Afghani cultures. His coloring was clearly passed down through Mabel, who looked more Native American than Mennonite, most of whom, Ruth knew, were German or Swiss.
I miss you, Ruth thought, and the realization surprised her as much as hearing her dead husband’s voice coming from her phone.
How could she miss a man who’d been parted from her for so long? For, yes, absence did make the heart grow fonder, but then, after a while, that shield of self-preservation grew thicker, and the heart forsook fondness for survival and all-consuming love for getting by. Ruth felt that she hadn’t truly missed her dead husband in four of their five years of marriage. And sometimes, when she’d missed Chandler the most, he’d been sitting in the same room.
SIX YEARS EARLIER
JUNE 7, 2012
Dear Chandler,
I received your letter today and immediately wanted to hop on a plane and adopt Sofie myself, but my parents are adamant that I am neither mature enough nor financially stable enough to consider it. Have you ever moved back in with your parents after living on your own (or at least in a dorm) for many years? It is not easy, and since I am their only child—granted, like Abraham and Sarah, when they least expected it—I find they are even more protective of me.
I have rebelled against this protection all my life, which is partly why, after college, I was so drawn to Children’s Haven. Bogotá’s crime rate alone about made my parents drop dead from fright. They jointly declared, “Ruth! Don’t be so obtuse. You’ll be kidnapped within a fortnight!” (And, yes, my English professor parents still use words like obtuse and fortnight.)
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