Becky lived on a small farm many years ago. She had a very strange doll. It looked very much like a gingerbread girl, but it was made out of cloth and hard, dry kernels of corn. Becky had wanted a doll for a long time, but they lived far away from the nearest town. After she had asked for a doll many times, her mother sat down and made one for her out of scraps of cloth. Then she stuffed it with corn from the grain bin.
It wasn’t a very pretty doll like girls have today, but Becky still loved her very much. She named her Betsy. She played house with Betsy and took her out for walks, just like little girls do with their dolls today.
One day, Becky and her brother Jimmy had a quarrel. Jimmy had been carving a little boat out of a block of wood. He was carefully cutting one of the masts when Becky accidently bumped into him. The boat was knocked out of his hand and broke when it hit the floor.
“Can’t you ever watch where you’re going?” Jimmy cried angrily. “Look what you did!”
“I don’t care if I did it!” snapped Becky. Then she thought to herself, “I shouldn’t have said that, because I really do care.” She was so ashamed of herself that she hurried out of the room.
“I’ll get back at her for that,” thought Jimmy, as he picked up the broken pieces of his boat. Just then he saw her doll lying on a chair. He snatched it and ran outside with it. He found a shovel in the tool shed, and then raced around to the garden. At the far end of the garden, Jimmy buried Becky’s doll in the dirt.
“There, that takes care of that! That’ll pay her back for breaking my boat,” he thought to himself. “Nobody will ever know what happened to it.”
It wasn’t long before Becky missed her doll. She cried and cried, but no one could find Betsy. The family couldn’t figure out what had happened to the doll, that is, everyone but Jimmy. The doll had just disappeared.
Jimmy wasn’t very happy after that. He told a lie when his mother asked him if he knew where the doll was. He began to feel that he had done something very wrong. He thought about digging up the doll again. But when he thought about the hard time he would have trying to explain how it got so dirty, he decided to leave it where it was.
A few days after a hard rain, Mother was in the garden picking tomatoes. Walking around the garden, she happened to notice a clump of new green plants at the far end. “That’s strange,” she thought. “I wonder what that is. Nothing is planted down there yet.” She walked over to look closer, and there, just in the shape of Becky’s cloth doll, were new, green corn shoots. The corn which was in Becky’s buried doll had all started to grow. Jim’s hidden sin was discovered, just as the Bible said it would be.
Mother soon found out the whole story. Becky was scolded for not telling Jimmy she was sorry about his broken boat. And Jimmy had to be punished for taking something that didn’t belong to him and for telling a lie.
Sin hidden in the heart will also be uncovered. You cannot hide sin from God. He wants to wash your sins away and make your heart clean. God’s Word, the Bible, says that “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.” 1 John 1:77But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7). The Lord Jesus loves you very much, and He is waiting for you to ask Him to wash your sins away. Why not ask Him to make your heart clean right now? Then your sins will “be as white as snow.” Isaiah 1:1818Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18).
ML-03/15/1987