Sarah Dixon Young's Blog: Love Much, page 18

Surrounded by God’s Shouts of Deliverance

My children and I recently visited the On-A-Slant Mandan Village at Fort Abraham Lincoln in Mandan, ND. 

We had fun exploring the round houses and marveling at their construction.

In the models of the village as it was in the early 1700’s, there is a long palisade along one side.

As I looked at the area where the fence had been, I imagined enemy tribes pouring over the hilly prairie and storming the village. Did the fence keep the enemy out while the Mandan warriors assembled? 

I th...

Swallowed Up

If Fairy Tales are any indication, one of mankind’s worst fears is being swallowed up.

Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, Hansel and Gretel, and The Gingerbread Man all include antagonists who will swallow you in one gulp, one bite, or one meal.

To be swallowed is to be consumed, to cease to exist.

Scientists recently discovered a dormant black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring galaxy. A dormant black hole is one which has sucked up everything in its gravita...

Bigger Pots

My kids recently helped replant an aloe.

They took shoots of all sizes and transplanted each one into a different sized pot. Small shoots went in the tiniest pots. Larger ones needed more room.

Some of the larger ones have already sent up shoots of their own and are large enough to need new pots. 

This Fall, my oldest will venture into highschool while my youngest experiments with kindergarten (“kitten garden”). It is easy for me to just continue in the same old routines we’ve always h...

For the Birds

We’ve been delighted with the flurry of Baltimore Orioles visiting our bird feeders this year.

My oldest son laughed when he learned that they like to eat orange slices and grape jelly. 

When we noticed them drinking out of the hummingbird feeders, we wondered why they had such a sweet tooth. 

Orioles, Grosbeaks, and Hummingbirds all enjoy a higher sugar diet during some parts of the year. My son hypothesized that it had to do with the distance of their migration patterns. Did longer m...

Cleansed or Consumed?

Many men work hard for spiritual cleansing.

Some stoke the fire. Some bring large stones to place in the fire. Once the stones are hot, still other men remove them from the fire and pour water over them to create a great storehouse of steam.

They bathe in the steam they have created, hoping their work will achieve the desired ends of eliminating both sweat and negativity from their bodies and surroundings. 

To them, this is a holy fire where they must labor intensely for spiritual clea...

Seed Potential

A seed almost gets lost in the palm of my hand.

It is so small, but its potential and purpose are great.

If the seed never germinates, it will never fulfil the purpose for which it was created. It will always stay the small, seemingly insignifcant piece of organic matter.

However, if the seed is planted, it bursts and dies. The cracked pieces of the hull fall away. The inner core is consumed. Suddenly, the death of the seed has produced a new life of something altogether different. A n...

Life, Death, and Charlotte’s Web

When author E.B. White recorded the audiobook version of his classic children’s story Charlotte’s Web, it took him seventeen tries to record the scene where Charlotte, the spider, dies.

He would begin weeping. The producer would stop the recording. They would take a walk outside and then come back and try it again.

Seventeen tries. You may scoff at the man’s emotional reaction to the death of a fictional arachnid, but Charlotte was his creation. All the details of love, loss, grief, and h...

When Empty Gets Full

The time I encountered a bear while hiking, empty space mattered.

I froze, calculating the distance between the bear and me, the space I judged I could throw a peanut butter cracker, and the speed at which bears can cross empty space.

When the good samaritans who rescued me drove me further down the mountain in their pickup truck, I was even more thankful for the growing amount of empty space between me and that bear.

Empty space matters when a loved one passes away, leaving behind an ...

Steamed Clean

Last week, a young man in a black hoodie steam cleaned all the chairs at church.

I’m embarrassed to tell you how filthy the chairs were. Five years of spaghetti dinners and Vacation Bible Schools accumulated in real time.

The cleaner’s hoodie reads, “Left it in the Waters.” His sister gave it to him when he was baptized two Easters ago. He went from being someone who didn’t know any Christians and didn’t know there was a church next to his house to being someone completely transformed by ...

Sour, Like Milk

The kids and I celebrated the end of our school year with a trip to the local dairy. 

The folks there transform delicious, creamy milk into many flavors of gelato and cheese. Milk, when it is good, is very good, and when it is bad, it is, well, sour.

When milk goes sour at our house, we give it to the cat. It’s not good for much else. Whether it got too warm, was poured into a dirty container, or natural bacteria took over after the passing of time, no one wants to drink sour milk.

Whe...