Sarah Dixon Young's Blog: Love Much, page 19

What can we do?

I have a nine year old. It’s been an emotional week as we’ve watched the smiling faces of other nine year olds, lost in a horrific murder, roll across our screens.

What can we do to protect our children?

What can we give them to prepare for such a world?

We need to give our children the Gospel.

We don’t need to wait until they’re older before we discuss sin, judgment, and hell. We don’t need to wait until they can understand complex doctrinal arguments. We certainly should not wait ...

It’s the Little Things

I found a turtle hatchling in February.

It made me wonder how the little things survive winter. Did you know that they produce a special type of antifreeze to keep ice from forming inside their cells?

The hatchling stops moving and breathing. Even its tiny heartbeat stops. However, when warmer temperatures roll back around, the turtle rehydrates and begins life where he left off. 

Fertility specialists have captured this same method for freezing human embryos, called blastocysts. In a ...

Overcoming Evil One Note at a Time

A friend came to tune our piano.

It was a lengthy process, as our piano has not been tuned for the entire time we’ve owned it. Each key had to be tuned to the tone it was designed to play, in addition to being tuned to its fellow keys. The tuner worked meticulously with a small wrench and hammers, cleaning out the pennies that the baby had dropped years ago and the candy my son dropped months ago. 

When the broken pedals were fixed, the keys were carefully tuned, and the dust and debris wa...

Kindness Came Looking

Prodigals break our hearts.

One day, they grin toothlessly at the camera as they hold up the cake celebrating their 10th birthday, and it seems like the next when they peer at you confusedly with blue lips and skin as their body tries to process the poison of fentanyl. 

When you care about the prodigal, the far country seems far indeed.

My children recently memorized Luke 15, and one of them asked the question, “If the shepherd went looking for the sheep and the woman went looking for ...

Your Gentleness has made me Great

The snow has melted enough this week to be able to see the seesaw in our neighborhood playground.

Soon, children will be back at play, laughing as they go up, crying when they pinch their heels or hit their chins on the way down.

Seesaw fun in the summer

Yet, they all persist in loving the seesaw. It’s funny to watch a young child hop on one side and plead with a larger sibling to get on the other. The lack of balance frustrates the little one until the sibling adjusts to make it mo...

Death in the Pot

    There are some pictures too ugly to paint with words. 

    I recently visited a friend who is homeless and suicidal. While speaking with my friend, I remembered times past when I sat beside the ICU bed of first her father and then her mother whose organs shut down after lifetimes of habitual drug use. 

    While my friend talked, my mind’s eye played the ugly film of that family’s past. It is too ugly to paint with words, but I know my mental images are nothing compared to the one...

Star Stuff is Still Dust

    American Astronomer Carl Sagan narrated Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, an award winning television series that became the most widely watched series in the history of television.

    In public elementary school, many students like me were shown clips of Sagan’s series, where he told us, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made of the interiors of collapsing stars. We are all made of starstuff.”

    An alluring though...

Parable of Grace

Soiling Your hands with my formation

muddy rivulets stained Your arms of creation,

and lifeless mud I would’ve remained

but You breathed new life and called my name.

*

You knew the cost when this mud would say,

“I’ll be the master, though I am but clay.”

You knew even then how Your words would burn,

“For dust you are- to dust return.”

*

But on this patch of dry dust You tabernacled,

pitching Your tent where in love You had shackled

Your pierced hands, which for me now twice muddied,

wearing my filth, all bro...

Keep Watching

Jesus was dead. All was darkness.

The greatest surprise I ever experienced happened in the dark.

My father and I were sitting on a boat in the ocean. We were far enough from land that we couldn’t see any light, and both of us were gazing toward the eastern horizon.

Thousands of miles away lay the African coast, but all we could see was darkness. I could hear the splashing of the waves, and periodically the white crest of one would catch my eye if it came close enough.

All of a su...

All my Strength

“You just need to be strong.”

In a Bible study with incarcerated women, I often heard this exhortation from one to another. It was a vague admonishment to resist emotion and put up a block wall to seal out the tragic, terrible things they had seen.

It didn’t work.

Each day’s physical strength drops like grains of sand through an hour glass. As the sun sets each evening, we feel ourselves growing tired. Each year speeds up as we slow down. Our physical strength slips away, no matter wha...