Sarah Dixon Young's Blog: Love Much

Before the whole fishy incident, God gave Jonah this command: “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before Me.”

Obviously, Jonah did not like this command, and he attempted to flee from the presence of the Lord. (Mistake #1.)

You’ve probably read how that turned out. Jonah ended in a pile of whale vomit with PTSD and seaweed wrapped around his head.

God said, in essence, “Jonah, let’s try this again.”

He gave the command again, with slightly di...

All you football moms out there can identify with having no leisure even to eat.

You’ve carted them to practices and cheered them on in games. You’ve driven the length and width of the state of North Dakota (for example) with kids and crockpots in the trunk. Paper plates, pickle jars, and plastic forks are stowed in the vehicle as if it were a cruise ship.

And still you had no leisure to eat!

Between handing out paper plates of hotdish and cheering when your son scored a touchdown, you had no tim...

Every year, my Catholic school did a magazine subscription drive, and we had a pep rally to get very excited about the prizes we could win for being top sellers. 

This mostly included ornately decorated pompoms with googly eyes called “weepuls.” Some of mine even had peel and stick feet so that I could stick them to my backpack. 

Don’t worry. This article will not be asking you to purchase a magazine subscription. I am turning forty-two this week, and I found...

My church hosted a 3 on 3 basketball tournament at our local recreation center over the weekend.

There was a great turnout, and it was fun to see the young folks competing and laughing. Several people shared their testimonies. Jesus, the Good Shepherd who goes looking for lost sheep, was doing just that on Saturday afternoon.

I was helping in the kitchen, mixing kool-aid and handing out cookies. I had gotten there late because a young woman had gone missing near my house, and we had helpe...

I put an ad on Tradio looking for giveaway chickens or roosters, and I was inundated with calls. 

The inflated price of chicks competed with the inflated price of eggs this Spring, so instead of buying chicks, I waited. Perhaps someone would have extra chickens in the Fall.

They did. After our homeschool group on a Tuesday, I took my kids with me to a local farm where a very nice couple met us and allowed us to catch twenty of their chickens. We loaded them in our minivan and took them ho...

Here lies a Poet; or what once was he;

Pray, gentle Reader, pray for S.T.C.

That he who three score years, with toilsome Breath,

Found Death in Life, may now find Life in Death.

Mercy for praise- to be forgiven for fame

He ask’d and hoped through Christ-

Do thou the same!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote a lot of things during his lifetime, but perhaps none are so poignant as his epitaph. 

His life was not happy, riddled with loss, addiction, failure, and broken relat...

The kitten’s piteous meowing sounded weak. 

It had fallen down an old well in our yard. My son carefully removed the sheets of corrugated metal and peered into the grimy blackness.

“It’s so far down,” he said. “I’m not sure I can get it out.”

As one of my daughters went for a long-handled net, I remembered a time I had heard a child’s piteous sobbing from a trash can. The six year old hadn’t been too far to reach physically, but emotional rescue was another story.

That scene played ...

When Jesus sent His disciples out two by two, they cast out unclean spirits, and they called for people to repent of their sins. 

They were excited when they returned to Him with the world’s first Christian missionary stories. 

Missionary stories aren’t in vogue any more. My favorite one, written by Amy Carmichael, a missionary to India at the beginning of the twentieth century, attempts to tell Things As They Are. 

She says that writing about sharing the Gospel with Hindus in India is...

I prayed for my pastor today.

He had crawled up into the church’s playground equipment and was scrubbing graffitied profanity with a magic eraser. 

As I watched him scrub, I thought of the many times people brought him their sins, cloaked as problems to be solved. Instead of offering magic erasers, my pastor gave the Gospel Truth that Jesus is the only One who can forgive sins, and repentance is all that is needed.

I prayed for my pastor today.

He was cooking the potluck meal in the...

This article first appeared in the Devils Lake Journal Sept. 25, 2025.

liturgy: (n) a form or formulary according to which public religious worship is conducted; from the Greek “leitourgia,” meaning public service

The mass might have been in Latin for all my classmates knew.

I peeked to the right and to the left. It was Wednesday. Our whole row appeared monotonous, wearing one school uniform, having the same ponytail hairstyle, and chanting the same words.

The liturgy seemed to be t...