A New Day

  Hebrews 10:22, “Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscious. . .” H. Norman Wright in his book, Why Did This Happen to Me? (Servant, 1999), relates a powerful story about Sarah. She lived in the late 1800s. Her income was $1,000 a day, but she had also inherited $20 million. By today’s standards Sarah would have been a billionaire. But Sarah was also miserable. Her only child died at five weeks. Then her husband passed away. To get away from painful memories, Sarah moved from Connecticut to San Jose, California. She bought an eight-room farmhouse there, plus 160 adjoining acres. Then she began a massive remodeling project. She hired sixteen carpenters to work on her house, twenty-four hours a day, every day, for the next thirty-eight years. The floor plan was bizarre. Corridors were put in at random. Some led nowhere. A set of stairs led to a ceiling that had no door, and one door opened to a blank wall. There were tunnels, trap doors, and secret passageways. The work on this mysterious mansion finally came to a halt after it covered six acres. It had six kitchens, thirteen bathrooms, forty stairways, forty-seven fireplaces, fifty-two skylights, 467 doors, ten thousand windows, 160 rooms, and one bell tower. According to legend, Sarah said she would have “visitors” every night, until 2:00 a.m. The visitors supposedly were U.S. soldiers and Indians killed on the frontier by a new invention, the repeating rifle. Her name? Sarah Winchester. The new rifle brought millions of dollars to her family but death to thousands of people. That guilt haunted Sarah Winchester the rest of her life. Guilt is a terrible task master. But what Sarah never came to realize is there is a means by which our conscious can be forever cleansed from the heavy burden of guilt; and that is by the washing fount of the blood of Jesus Christ. Friend, if you are haunted by specters of a guilty past, you can forever be set free by God’s grace; and walk out of any mansion built for the dead, into the glorious light of a peaceful new day.

Source: H. Norman Wright, Why Did This Happen to Me? (Servant, 1999)