Mercy's Rose ~ Reader Friday

Mercy’s Rose by Delores Topliff is this week’s Reader Friday. Here’s the opening: “People had frozen to death on Minnesota’s prairies, even close to home, and not that long ago. Mercy Shantz was determined not to be one of them.”

But first the photo and verse. I took the photo this past Tuesday after getting up at 6:30 Monday morning to snap a shot of the space launch, only to learn it’d been postponed. So, I set my clock for the next morning and was outside with my phone to capture the launch again. This time there was “lift off” and I even got a video that I’ll share the link to next week. I thought the verse went very well with the photo.

**Now for Mercy’s Rose by Delores Topliff. Here’s the cover and back copy:**

Version 1.0.0

Mercy Schantz, a nearly twenty-one-year-old Minnesota Amish woman, cares for her younger siblings in the home of her widowed father. It appears this may be her future until she overhears her best friend’s widowed father tell her daed he’d like to remarry and wonders if a young woman like Mercy might consider him. Her dad asks her if she has any interest. She wonders what Amish society expects. What does God require? What is her duty? Can she follow her heart?

After Mercy’s dangerous blizzard buggy accident, when Caleb, an almost eighteen-year-old community member, rescues her and her younger brother, she discounts him because he is young.
She longs to do something significant with her life but struggles with what may be her God-given duty. After that same brother is in a serious accident, Mercy stays in town to learn and bring home basic medical care and finds she has a dream of her own.

Will Mercy trust God for guidance and the conviction to pursue the meaningful life she longs for? Will tradition and obligation restrict her? Or can she follow her heart?

My take:

This isn’t your typical Amish story. I loved how Delores Topliff made it more like women’s fiction with Mercy being pulled between her faith and what she believed God was calling her to do. There is also romance with the handsome Caleb, a man a couple of years her junior. Mercy has to decide if he’s too young for her while at the same time deciding if she should be obedient to the dictates of her faith or follow what God is calling her to do. I really enjoyed this story that featured a conflict between faith and family responsibility and what a couple should do when they feel God is calling them to go outside of their comfort zones.

You can purchase it here.

Here’s today’s song. It was one that we sang today at the Florida Christian Writers Conference I attended with my daughter, Carole.