Deb’s Dozen: Amazing what hope and healing occurs when God’s grace touches hurting hearts.

My review of As Waters Gone By started with that Deb’s Dozen. Recently I interviewed Cynthia Ruchti and asked her why she had chosen the topic she so eloquently wrote about in the novel. She told me she had three reasons: first, she had watched someone she cared about head to prison determined that their marriage would stick through this trial. They are separated by four states, so the wife took a second job in order to pay for traveling to see her husband. This they will endure for seven years. Second, she had been reading in the book of Job and Job 11:16 NIV spoke to her, You will surely forget your trouble, recalling it only as waters gone by.. And third, she had seen a picture of debris being pulled out to sea and realized there is always a fresh wave.

Asked what she learned about the topic or about herself as she wrote As Waters Gone By, she said she experienced a revolution in life–a fresh way of thinking. She was intrigued by the concept of a second chance–seeing people as people and not their appearance or their problems. This concept also appears in her new book, Tattered and Mended.She learned to give new grace to people who go through the travails of life and come out stronger.

Cynthia’s family settled in southwest Wisconsin after having moved twelve times before she was twelve. She attended Moody Bible Institute for a year and the Technical College in Madison, Wisconsin to become a chemistry lab assistant. After she married her grade school sweetheart, she and her husband moved to central Wisconsin. She has been married for forty-three years and has three grown children ranging from twenty-eight to forty-one–all living within fifteen miles of her–and has five adorable grandkids.

She started writing while at home with her kids and took correspondence courses in creative writing. After having several articles published, she tackled one of her last assignments–to write a script for a fifteen-minute radio broadcast. In a way only God could orchestrate, within a few weeks of completing that assignment, she was asked to write and produce a fifteen-minute radio broadcast called The Heartbeat of the Home. It took nine months to create that first broadcast and nine months for that new station to go on the air. The show started on one station, the popularity grew, the Billy Graham station picked it up, and at one time the show was carried on forty-eight stations. The broadcast eventually aired Monday through Friday and retired in 2012 after thirty-three years on the air, about the time Cynthia was juggling book contracts.

Cynthia has written over fifteen books since her award-winning debut novel, They Almost Always Come Home, in 2009, and has won multiple awards for her writing including two Selah and three Christian Retailing BEST awards along with others from the Christian Authors Network and the Advanced Writers and Speakers Association ForeWord Reviews, and other honors. She says whether writing novels, novellas, nonfiction, or speaking for women’s events, she tells stories hemmed in hope.

Asked for something her readers don’t know and might find interesting about her, she grinned and said she was a baton twirler in high school and can write backwards as well as forwards!

To learn more about Cynthia, you can check out her Amazon page, Amazon’s Cynthia Ruchti Page or her website, Cynthia Ruchti