Delighted to have a beautiful guest post to share with you today from uber talented writer, Jolina Petersheim. Jolina’s beautiful words speak for themselves, so no more from me!

Over to you, Jolina…

Our third little girl was extremely colicky for her first six months of life. Trying to help, I gave up dairy and chocolate and only drank coffee when toothpicks no longer propped open my eyes. My husband and I acquired some toned biceps and mean juggling skills by passing her back and forth as we took care of household duties like giving baths and packing lunch.

I’m not sure how we did it, and to this day, an infant’s high-pitched cry either makes me want to rock in place or guzzle a mocha latte to compensate for those months I couldn’t.

You’ve been there too, right? You’ve taken Parental Juggling 101?

The crazy thing about parenting is that we usually become parents because of love, but it’s easy to forget that love when we’re so focused on keeping our offspring alive.

I remember standing in the kitchen around this season, and my husband, Randy, made a comment about how I cook (think Jackson Pollock doing the “drip and splash” style with a spatula instead of a paintbrush), and I snapped at him.

Randy has a very dry sense of humor, and one of the reasons I fell in love with him is because he makes me laugh even when I’m rolling my eyes. But that same dry humor can grate on me when my nerves are raw, and listening to a baby cry for hours on end can really leave one’s nerves raw (not to mention I’d given up dairy, chocolate, and coffee).

Our eldest daughter, who is attuned to everyone and everything, overheard us and planted her fists on her little hips. “Hey, you guys,” she said. “Don’t fight.”

There’s nothing like your child telling you not to fight that really makes you reevaluate how you talk to each other.

We reevaluated, and it was easy to hear that amidst survival we’d forgotten how to be kind.

I’d let myself off the hook because we all need a safe place to “vent.” For over ten years of marriage, Randy has been my safe place, and I have been his.

But that venting became a habit rather than an exception to the norm, and I found myself waiting for him to come through the door so I could unload on him.

What if I’d treated my roommate in college the same? Barely waiting until she’d dumped her backpack to launch into a diatribe about papers and grades?

The poor girl would have moved dorms.

Then how come I thought I could treat my spouse the same?

All five of my novels explore some question I want to ask—or some question that surfaces as I dig deeper into the story. One of the main questions I wanted to explore in my new novel, How the Light Gets In, is how to keep a marriage vibrant during the young parenting years.

It’s as simple—and as hard—as the golden rule kids learn in kindergarten: Treat each other the way you want to be treated.

Or as Jesus says in Luke 6:31 (NIV): “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”

Rather than gathering my husband’s faults to see if his weigh more than mine, what if I would instead praise the areas where he’s succeeding?

He makes the coffee in the morning. Does the dishes at night. Warms the van for me before I leave to go somewhere. Helps me unload the groceries if he’s home. Even as I type this at the kitchen table, he’s on the other side, helping our first-grade daughter with her math.

What if we each blind ourselves to the areas that aren’t worth fighting over—the messy kitchen, the beard hairs left in the sink—and instead focus on the good?

Kindness is simple, but it changes everything. Kindness begins when we see each other’s value. When we call forth the good.

Thank you, Jolina ~ such wise words.

Jolina’s latest novel is keeping Kleenex in business! I’m assured that tissues are essential reading equipment for How the Light Gets In, so I’m stocking up as it is next up in my TBR pile! Don’t miss entering the giveaway below, thanks to the generosity of Jolina’s publisher, Tyndale House.

From the highly acclaimed author of The Outcast and The Alliance comes an engrossing novel about marriage and motherhood, loss and moving on.

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.

Jolina Petersheim is the bestselling author of The Alliance, The Midwife, and The Outcast, which Library Journal called “outstanding . . . fresh and inspirational” in a starred review and named one of the best books of 2013. That book also became an ECPA, CBA, and Amazon bestseller and was featured in Huffington Post’s Fall Picks, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and the Tennessean. CBA Retailers + Resources called her second book, The Midwife, “an excellent read [that] will be hard to put down,” and Romantic Times declared, “Petersheim is an amazing new author.” Her third book, The Alliance, was selected as one of Booklist’s Top 10 Inspirational Fiction titles of 2016. Jolina’s nonfiction writing has been featured in Reader’s Digest, Writer’s Digest, and Today’s Christian Woman. She and her husband share the same unique Amish and Mennonite heritage that originated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but they now live in the mountains of Tennessee with their three young daughters. Jolina blogs regularly at www.jolinapetersheim.com.

Relz Reviewz Extras
All Things Petersheim @ Relz Reviewz
Visit Jolina’s website and blog
Buy at Amazon: How the Light Get In or Koorong

a Rafflecopter giveaway