Through Rushing Water

Sophia Makinoff has the perfect teaching job and dreams to match.  She is certain to become the wife of Congressman Montgomery.  Her world crashes around her when the Congressman proposes—to her roommate.  Unable to bear what she knows will be (the pity of her acquaintances and Annabelle’s prattling about the wedding she thought would be hers), Sophia signs up with the Foreign Mission Board to be a missionary to China.  In order to escape, she takes the first available position and begins her journey to teach in the Dakota Territory—not exactly China!  Her charge is to teach and bring Christianity to the Ponca Indians and others are already in place to “Americanize” the Indians and make them into farmers.  When she arrives at her destination, there was no one to greet her and the landscape showed little but a few run-down buildings and sparse vegetable gardens.  How soon could a replacement be found?  Sophia isn’t certain this is the place for her.  Is there anything that might keep her here?

But the Ponca Indian children and their families begin to pull at her heartstrings.  Their need for the basic necessities of clothing and food is so great and the government doesn’t deliver anything they promised.  Combine the children with the local Agency carpenter, Will, and perhaps Sophia can stick around and pour her life into making a difference here.  Will teaches her to “ignore the rushing water” that could completely suck her in because there are so many needs and simply focus on the issues that she can change and improve.  Could there be a lesson in that for me?  I think so!

Author Catherine Richmond does an excellent job capturing the time period and forms a story not so familiar in the bookstores and to readers.  Having read several novels set in the same era, most that I have read are more the mail order bride, searching for riches kind of story.  Not so with Through Rushing Water.  Sophia was a well developed character you can’t help but love.  Through all her experiences, her faith becomes more than head knowledge and memorizing prayers.  Just as God uses the circumstances in our lives to draw us to Him,  Sophia’s position and the people she has been placed with are used to make her more into the person God created her to be.  I also had never had such a clear picture of how the Indians were treated when white European descendants began moving into their homeland. Your heart will be moved to compassion if not anger for the way they were cheated and ignored.  I look forward to reading other books by Ms. Richmond.

I did receive this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers in exchange for an honest review.  I was not obligated in any way to leave a positive review.