Based on her personal experience of nearly dying of breast cancer in her 20’s, Sarah talks about navigating the storms of life and how we can experience God’s goodness in spite of external circumstances.  Sarah helps people honestly acknowledge and encounter their pain, and then leads them to understand how to experience God’s presence in the midst of pain because, as Charles Spurgeon said, in the storms of life, God comes closer to us than the storm could ever be.

In Genesis 16, Hagar encounters God and becomes the only person in the Bible to name God as El Roi, The God Who Sees. This story and Sarah's friendship with an overlooked Somali family in Portland Oregon led her to write the memoir The Invisible Girls and start The Invisible Girls Trust Fund. She encourages her audience to see the marginalized and invisible people and practice ordinary kindnesses every day so that they know they are loved and seen by Jesus and his followers.

In addition to giving messages and retreat talks, Sarah also leads workshops that use creative prompts, dialogue and discussion to help people heal from their life experiences.  As Sarah says, storytelling is a tool that has the power to transform our wounds into scars.  This workshop can be tailored to a one-day event, or spread out over a weekend.  Depending on your group’s interests and needs, Sarah is also available for one-on-one mentoring appointments to give attendees more specific feedback and advice on how to tell their story well.

In 2015, Sarah spent three months working at a hospital in Togo, West Africa, which the United Nations ranked the Least Happy Country in the World. Sarah witnessed more people dying in one week in Togo than she’d seen in ten years of practicing medicine in the U.S. People died of diseases that were preventable, or easily treatable, given adequate resources. Tetanus, malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, meningitis, childbirth complications and AIDS claimed dozens of lives in the time she was there. After contracting malaria herself, the village she was working in ran out of water and, while temperatures soared over 100 degrees, the only option people had was to drink out of old cisterns. As Sarah struggles to stay in Togo in spite of these difficulties, she contemplates significant questions. Why does I Corinthians say that out of Faith, Hope and Love that Love is the greatest? What helps us persist in life’s difficult situations — whether at home or abroad — when we run out of motivation, energy and emotion to keep going? And, What does it mean for each of us to choose to become people of love?

Many people see that the world is broken and have a desire to use their creativity, talent, skills, intellect and energy to change the world. But what exactly does that mean? Sarah shares her own story of telling the admissions committee at Yale that they should admit her because, as she said, “I’m going to change the world some day, and I’m giving you the chance to say, ‘We knew her when!'” But that was just the beginning of Sarah's journey to discover what it means, and what it takes, to change the world. Borrowing from the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi pottery, where artists purposefully shatter ceramic vessels and then glue them back together with lacquer laced with platinum or silver or gold, Sarah inspires her audience to become artists who see the cracks in the world right around them -- and pour Love into those places, brining healing our beautiful but desperately broken world.

Sarah spent years training to become a physician assistant, hoping to use her skills to help patients heal. And then, at age 27, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Sarah began her own personal journey of pursuing wellness for herself. She realized that wellness is an even higher ideal than healing, because it's possible to be healthy (i.e., disease-free) in your body, but not well in your heart, mind and soul. And it's possible to be dealing with health issues and yet still find wellness deep inside. In this talk -- which can be done as one talk or expanded further in a retreat-style setting -- Sarah teaches audiences helpful practices to help them become truly, deeply well in every area of their being.