For the true story, see Genesis 16, 17:15-21, 18:1-15 and 21:1-7.
It’s really rather embarrassing: I’m an old woman, yet here I am expanding like a young wife only recently wed!
My husband, Abraham, is ridiculously happy, and, I must confess, so am I. From time to time, one or other of us just starts laughing for no apparent reason, and whenever one starts, the other always follows suit. My oldest servant says we are behaving like a pair of excited newly-weds, and maybe we are. But truly, we have a very good reason to be that way.
When we were married, we naturally expected that we would have children – after all, that’s what marriage is meant to give. But year after year, nothing happened, and eventually we both gave up.
Then El Shaddai, our God, told Abraham to leave our home in Ur. God would show him a new land.
Oh, leaving Ur was hard. Nevertheless, we packed up and left, along with our father and some other family members. We stopped at Haran and stayed there until Terah, our father, died, then we went south to Canaan with Lot, our nephew.
God had already promised that Abraham would become a great nation, but once we arrived in Canaan he promised even more: the land would belong to us and to our descendants.
The problem was, of course, that we didn’t have any descendants. No children, no descendants. Time had been ticking away, and, realistically, it was already much too late for me to ever have a child.
By the time we had been there for about ten years, I was desperate. Now, I know that I should have just trusted God, but sometimes I don’t find that as easy as I should.
Then I came up with the perfect solution – or so it seemed. True, it wouldn’t quite be my child, but the mother would be my servant-girl, Hagar, and the father would be my husband. It would be the best we could do. When I think back on it now, it’s rather a horrible thing for a wife to plan, but, as I said, I was desperate. It seemed a simple way to get the child that God had promised us but wasn’t quite delivering. If I had just trusted God and waited, I wouldn’t
have had all the problems with Hagar, and we wouldn’t have this boy Ishmael around. Who knows how much trouble he and his offspring will cause in the future?
Faith is always easier to justify in hindsight than it is at the time when we have to choose our path.
I spoke to Abraham and he agreed to my plan. To this day, I don’t really know whether he thought it was a good idea or not, but he saw that I had my heart set on it and didn’t argue. I wish he had.
So I gave Hagar her orders and made all the arrangements with Abraham. And just a few weeks later, with a look of contempt, Hagar told me that she was pregnant. It wasn’t hard to read her thoughts: “He’s not too old to get me pregnant, but you’re not a real woman.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that she would feel like that and I was very upset. Upset and angry. Crying as I told Abraham, resentfully blaming him for everything.
He was too kind to argue, saying that she was my servant girl and it was up to me what I did with her. I didn’t realise at the time just how generous he was being in that, either, and I probably would’ve been furious with him if I had realised. You see, Abraham has always been very fond of Ishmael and, looking back, I have no doubt that he would have liked to lavish great care on Hagar during her pregnancy, just as he is now doing with me. It’s what he is like: generous to a
fault. Instead, he left it up to me, and I mistreated her harshly.
When I think how tired I have been at times during this pregnancy and remember how I demanded incessant physical work from Hagar while she was pregnant, and even ridiculed her when her increasing size made her work awkward, I feel ashamed. But at the time I was bitterly determined to pay her back for getting pregnant – illogical though that was.
I thought I was the one who had been most cruelly mistreated – by both my husband and my slave.
After a while, my callousness drove Hagar to run away, only to return a few days later with a story of God having spoken to her, telling her to come back and submit to me.
I had very mixed feelings. I didn’t really want her or her baby at all, but at the same time I was actually quite relieved that she hadn’t got lost in the wilderness and died. I was forced to believe her story, and that meant God was relying on me to look after her properly! Well, I did my best, and so she ended up with a son, Ishmael, while I still had none.
My husband loved Ishmael, and that hurt too.
For 13 long years, it hurt.
Then one day God spoke to my husband and told him that I was going to have a baby in a year’s time, and that we were to call him Isaac.
By then, I was 90 years old. 90! Did you ever hear anything more ridiculous than the idea that a 90-year-old woman could have a baby? Knowing that it was El Shaddai who had said it made me pause in my scoffing, but still….
Be that all as it may, there was something more important to be done immediately. God had said that all of the males in our camp had to be circumcised as an ongoing sign of the covenant he was making with Abraham and his descendants. Including Ishmael.
Abraham got on with the job immediately – that’s what he’s like – and for a few days all of the males in the camp were rather sore. Of course, that meant there was a lot more work for us women to do while they recovered, and that effectively took my mind off the crazy idea of me having a child.
But God didn’t let me forget it. Within a week, he repeated the promise, this time through three men who seemed to just appear in front of my husband while he was dozing at the door of the tent during the hottest part of the day. All of a sudden we were all busy making a meal, and then Abraham talked with them as they ate. I was standing just inside the door of the tent – not eavesdropping, of course, but making sure that if they needed anything, I could get it
immediately.
When I heard my name it grabbed my attention, and I heard exactly what he said: “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife shall have a son.”
To be honest, my inability to have a child has overshadowed many other things in my life. If we use our hands a lot they can be rubbed raw, but over time they grow calluses. When things hurt us emotionally, we tend to develop some form of protection in the same way. For me, it is laughing – when people talk about children, I laugh, to try to hide just how much it hurts.
So when I heard this man say that I would have a child I laughed. Just quietly – there was no way anyone could have heard it.
But, somehow, he did hear.
He must have been an angel or something sent from El Shaddai himself. My husband says that he was really speaking the words of God; that it was just the same as talking to God – which my husband has done on several occasions.
“Why did Sarah laugh?” he asked, and repeated that I would have a child at about that time next year.
His ability to hear my almost-silent laugh frightened me and I lied, saying that I had not laughed. He wouldn’t let it go and repeated the statement that I had indeed laughed, and I suppose I sort of admitted it.
After a while, the men were ready to leave, and Abraham walked some way with them.
I stayed in the tent, sitting back and thinking hard.
Would I really have a child?
Was it possible?
Could I let myself hope that it was possible?
I wanted to hope, but the calluses around my heart made it hard. Giving way to hope would make it so much harder afterwards if it didn’t happen, and it had been many years since having a child was even a physical possibility for me. But I knew that God kept his promises.
I sat and I struggled, and as I did so, my lord Abraham was struggling too – although I didn’t know it at the time. He was trying to save the life of our nephew Lot. God told him that he was going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, those evil cities, and we knew that Lot and his family lived in Sodom.
Funnily enough, this incident that meant death to so many provided the certainty that allowed me to give myself over entirely to hope. The very next morning, we saw God’s terrifying judgement as fire and destruction fell from heaven on Sodom and Gomorrah.
It gave me the confirmation I needed: if God could do something so great, he could easily make me have a baby. So I gave myself over to hope, and that’s when things began to get exciting.
Over the next few months, I began to feel younger. People have always said that I am good-looking, but in those couple of months, I actually began to agree with them. It was amazing. As I had grown older, my skin had become thinner and less resilient, and despite what people kindly said about me, I knew that I had grown wrinkled. But suddenly it was as if time was going backwards and I was getting younger. The age spots on my hands disappeared, my skin felt better
and my hair started to shine again.
Abraham noticed it immediately and we were both not-so-quietly amazed. I couldn’t help holding out my hands in front of me and just looking at them. Each day they looked younger and younger. Fewer wrinkles, and no pain in my joints. Everything was delightful, particularly when it became clear that my dear husband thought so too.
In some ways, it really was like being newly married all over again. We both enjoyed it very much.
And then, at just the right time to match God’s promise, I found that I was pregnant.
So now, here we are, waiting for the day when our son will be born. When I first decided to embrace hope in God’s promise, I still feared what would happen to an old woman trying to give birth to a child. Could I live through it? I suppose I still don’t know the answer, but I’m not worried now because physically, I’m not an old woman any more.
Abraham and I still laugh many times every day, and whenever we start, we look at each other and laugh some more. I used to laugh to mask my suffering, but God knew it all anyway. Now he has combined laughter and a baby as only El Shaddai could. At God’s command, our baby will be named “Isaac” – laughter..
