I’ve just finished BLESSINGS by Kim Vogel Sawyer. Third in a contemporary series about a Mennonite community in Kansas, Blessings is the story of Trina Muller’s struggle between her very conservative faith and her heart’s calling to be a veterinarian. Practically unheard of for a girl in Sommerfeld, she yearns to complete high school and college. The resistance she meets and the unhappiness this conflict causes make Trina question the rightness of her decisions. Nearly everyone she knows, from her dear family to her boyfriend Graham, opposes the idea of a Mennonite woman with such worldly aspiriations. How can she justify her calling to be a vet with her church’s demands she be a stay-at-home-mother and wife? In her heart, she wants to be an obediant Mennonite. Yet her mind is eager to learn and to help her community as a veterinarian to their animals.
Throughout this story I was kept in suspense as to how the author would solve Trina’s continuing conflict. As she has in her many novels, Kim Sawyer carefully handles the intricacies of family and friend relationships in the face of incompatible ideals. Her protagonists embody the words of Jesus to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.
