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Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

To everything there is a season . . .

The farm my mother and her eight siblings grew up on in Indiana has been the inspiration for the farms I write about in my books. I vividly remember watching my Uncle Harvey, the youngest in the family, ride his tractor in his fields. His wife, my Aunt Delores, made the family welcome whenever they visited, and that can’t have been easy given the number of family members who descended on the farm for vacations. She has often been the inspiration for the female characters who make a home so welcome, who make family keep wanting to go home. Aunt Delores made a little bedroom under the eaves of the second story so welcome for the many nieces and nephews who visited. She even kept a small toy chest that had belonged to my mom and her twin sister stocked with toys and let us choose one each time we came.

I was sitting on the grass near the road one day when I saw my first Amish buggy and became fascinated with the Amish.

Memories of how that farm looked so different from season to season inspired this story, the second in the Coming Home series. It starts in spring and ends up in winter, at Christmas, the holiest of holidays.

When people think of Christmas they usually think of home. But I got to wondering what happens if home is a place you’ve had to avoid? What happens then? My hero, Sam, has had to leave his Amish home and live in the Englisch world. Mary Elizabeth, the woman who loves him, believes he needs to return to his community and his faith—and her—and it will take her seasons to do so.

Thank you to my editor, Ramona Richards, for continuing to believe in my stories, and thank you to Teri Wilhelm, my macro editor, and everyone at Abingdon Press who helps produce beautiful covers and proofread and distribute . . . oh, so many people and so many jobs, I’ll never be able to thank everyone.

Thank you, dear reader, for choosing my books.

And thank You, God, for taking my hand and helping me tell a story of faith and love.