Sarah's Words of Wit(sdom)

I love snow. I may seem weird to you, but I always say if it’s going to be cold, it should at least snow! Snow makes the cold more enjoyable. I love the thought of God reaching into his bag of powdery white snow and sprinkling it onto the world, decorating the trees and the rooftops of houses, and dusting the ground. Sometimes God tosses snow onto the world, and sometimes he dumps the whole bag. When this happens, everything becomes white, covering any other color. Isaiah 1:18 says: “Come now, let us reason together,” says the LORD . “Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.” I attended a webinar last Thursday where the speaker talked about the significance of colors in writing. Scarlet and crimson, variations of red, symbolize anger, pain, and danger. Our sins are evil. Yet somehow I seem to think my sins are not as “red” as those people around me. “Mine are more…pink. Or puce.” I might find myself say...

Sirens sound outside my house. I rise from my chair to look, but before I reach the window, a bullhorn squeals and I stop in my tracks. “This is the police,” says a gruff voice, “Come out of the house with your hands in the air and throw down any weapons.” I frown, but turn to the front door and do as the man says. After all, you need to obey a police officer, especially if you haven’t done anything wrong, right? When I open the door, my heart flutters in my chest as I see about twenty guns pointing in my direction. “What’s this all about?” I step out onto the porch with my hands up, trying to figure out what was happening. Maybe they just have the wrong address. Two officers grab me and lock my wrists in handcuffs. “Hey, ouch! Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” I ask again. The officer looks at me funny, like I should know what this is about, then recites my rights. My mind swirls like alphabet soup and I can’t put the letters together to make any sense. After he finishes a...

I can’t tell you how relaxed I felt that I didn’t have to worry about posting for Thursday. When Monday came around I was calm and ready to post. It wasn’t easy cutting back on posting at first, but I’m glad I did it now. That made me wonder; why is it so hard to say no? Not necessarily just to bad things, but even some good things. About a month ago, I had an opportunity to write some Christmas monologues for my church. I knew I didn’t have any time (which was one of the reasons I cut back on posting), so I prayed about it and didn’t specially feel God leading either direction, so, after talking it over with many people I respect, I said “no”. It was hard, because church is a good thing, and what if God sent this opportunity my way for a reason and I turned it down? It’s so easy to say no if you know it’s wrong, but this wasn’t. A couple weeks later, one of my pastors told me that since I turned down the opportunity, things were headed in a direction that may be even better, and rem...

From now on, I’ll only be posting on Mondays, instead of twice a week on Mondays and Thursdays. The reason for this is that I’ve been so busy with my blog, I haven’t had much time for any other writing. I’m currently writing what I hope to be a novel, and I’m writing a few devotionals a month for RealTeenFaith.com. If I try to fit any other writing in that mix, I end up getting overwhelmed. So I decided that blogging a little less would give me more time to write in my novel and more time to concentrate on writing RTF devotionals when I need to. Then when God blesses me with another writing opportunity, I’ll have more time to fit it in. Yesterday, my pastor preached on “slowing down” and taking time to just be with God. He likes to say that’s why God called us human “beings” and not human “doings”. But so often I like to try to do things for God instead of just sitting at the feet of Jesus like Mary in the story of Mary and Martha. Serving God is great, but God cares more about having ...