It is my pleasure and delight to share my blog with my friend and to share my friend with you. Cynthia Ruchti is a delightful person, one I wish I lived much closer to so that we could spend hours talking, brainstorming, and encouraging each other. Fortunately there are phones — even though it is not the same.

Cynthia is a gifted writer. She writes from deep places and that pulls me deep into the pages of her books. Her first, They Almost Always Come Home, was not an easy read because of the subject. Yet I couldn’t put it down. When the Morning Glory Blooms is even better. Between the covers she weaves compelling stories about four women and how in different times they each deal with unplanned pregnancies. Grace stitches the story together while hope sings from its pages. This is a book to savor, weep over, and pray through. I adored it. Now here’s Cynthia:

Does it give away my age if I tell you my first babysitting jobs netted me 25 cents an hour? No, that’s wrong. I was the oldest of five children, so my first babysitting netted me nothing but my parents’ appreciation, which in the long run was worth far more.

As a young woman, a dozen or more career choices called to me. All of them had this common denominator: I wanted to be a wife and mother.

At twenty, I married my grade school sweetheart. At twenty-two, our first child was born. A baby changes everything.

The chemistry lab where I worked lost some of its luster—as if a chem lab has any true luster; more odors and whirling equipment—after our daughter was born. Three years later, a son. Nine years after we thought we were done expanding our family, another son. Babies change everything. Make room for more love. Can we convert that closet into another bedroom? We gave away all our baby things; now what? Oh, dear. I’ll be nursing during canning season.

Sometimes a positive pregnancy test stirs a dance of joy and a little wave of nausea. Sometimes it falls from a shocked teen’s limp hands. Almost always, it says, “This changes everything.”

When I wrote the novel When the Morning Glory Blooms, I drew from the dual wells of experience and imagination. What did an unplanned pregnancy feel like in the 1890s? I don’t know, but I can imagine. How did it affect the family, the community, the church family? How would a single mom navigate the 1950s when her life was anything but June Cleaver-like? A sea of teen moms in 2013 stand in need of our help and in an ageless, desperate need of grace. Imagination made me ask, “Who’s reaching out to the moms of those teen moms? Aren’t they as desperate for answers, grace, hope?”

A baby changes everything. A baby’s absence changes everything. Longed-for or feared, pregnancy induces a seismic shift that registers most profoundly in the heart. I went from woman to mother with one final push in the delivery room. Some move from teen to woman to mother with the same ten-count kind of push.

What was I thinking about when I wrote When the Morning Glory Blooms? How different our reactions can be when we first learn a baby is on the way. The indescribable sensation of life fluttering inside. The fervent and absolutely sincere cry, “I don’t think I can do this!” The millisecond following delivery when all labor is forgotten and the focus turns to a child who had been faceless until that moment. The feel of a newborn’s weight in the crook of a mom’s arm. The shift to protector/nurturer. The beginning of a lifetime of prayer.

What was on my mind? The pregnant woman who hasn’t felt the baby move for far too long. The woman rudely reminded that she’s not expecting, again. The teen carrying a secret that will make itself visible before she can figure out a way to tell her parents. The young man who will never know there once was a baby…

A baby changes everything. Mostly in the depths of the heart.

Cynthia Ruchti is an author and speaker who tells stories of Hope-that-glows-in-the-dark through her novels, novellas, nonfiction, and through speaking engagements for women’s groups and writers’ events. Her latest novel—When the Morning Glory Blooms—tells the story of three eras and three women facing the afterpains of unplanned pregnancy. You can learn more about that book or the others Cynthia has written through her website www.cynthiaruchti.com or by connecting through www.facebook.com/cynthiaruchtireaderpage or www.twitter.com/cynthiaruchti .