The desert wind howled outside the tent, but inside, Sarai sat still. Her hands, once smooth and youthful, were lined now. Her back ached more than it used to. Her eyes still searched the stars each night, but not with the same hope they once held. It had been years. Decades.
She had followed Abram into a land they didn’t know, leaving behind her family, her comfort, her identity. All because he said God spoke to him. He promised him a child, a nation, a legacy. And she had believed him. Each month bled into the next, leaving her arms empty, her womb hollow, her heart bitter.
Sarai remembered the day she gave Hagar to Abram. It was her idea. Maybe this was how God would fulfill His promise. Maybe Sarai had misunderstood. Perhaps she was never meant to be the mother, just the facilitator.
When Hagar conceived, Sarai smiled, a forced, splintering smile. But inside, something shattered. The girl looked at her differently now. With smugness. With pride. And Sarai hated that it had come to this. She hated that her faith had turned into a strategy.
Then came the name change. Abraham. Sarah. She had laughed when she heard it. Not with joy. With scorn. How could she not? Ninety years old, and now she would be called “mother of nations”? She laughed alone, bitter and cracked.
But when the visitors came, three men with strange eyes and knowing smiles, she listened from behind the curtain. One of them said the words that had haunted her dreams: “By this time next year, Sarah will have a son.” She laughed again. Silently. This time, not in mockery but in despair, disbelief, and exhaustion. She thought she was hidden. But the man asked, “Why did Sarah laugh?”
She froze. How did he know? Her name. Her laughter. Her secret sadness. And then he said gently, almost tenderly: “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” Sarah blinked. And for the first time in years, something cracked through the grief. Not certainty. Not joy. But a glimmer of hope.
The child came just as He said. She called him Isaac. She held him and laughed this time, not bitterly or cynically, but with real joy. Her voice echoed in the tent like music. “God has brought me laughter,” she said. “And everyone who hears about this will laugh with me.” Her laughter was a victory cry. A sound of faith resurrected.
Sarah had waited a lifetime for one child. But in that child was a covenant. And in that covenant, though she would never see it, it was a lineage that would stretch across generations, down to a manger in Bethlehem, and then to a cross, and beyond, bringing salvation to the world. She wasn’t just the mother of Isaac. She was the beginning of God’s grace, slowly unfolding.
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